A Golfer's Life Page 2

  A few weeks before our high school reunion, I stopped over to see Ken. I was on my way over to the club to test some new equipment on the range and perhaps play an afternoon round with a couple of members. He had been having difficulty with his vision, some sweating and nausea, but eerily, he experienced no pain to speak of. I remember he described it as “kind of weird” and explained that the doctors were stumped. A few days later he went in for more tests, and it was determined that a series of blood vessels that fed the rear portion of his brain were rapidly deteriorating. Ken was effectively suffering a series of mini-strokes that would kill him unless the condition could be surgically halted. The operation was extremely risky—it had been successfully performed only a few times—but it was just like him to elect to try it. They opened him up and realized it was too late. The doctors sent him home to be with Susie, and I saw him for the last time on a Saturday on my way over to play at the club. He suggested that I come by afterward and we’d have a vodka on the rocks, as we always did after a round. I promised him I would, and told him I would love nothing better.

  Two days later, Ken was dead. He was sixty-eight years old.

  Whatever my own bout with cancer failed to drive though my thick skull about life’s fleeting nature and fragile preciousness, Ken’s death drove home with the force of a steelyard hammer. It wasn’t just that Ken and I were the same age that shook me to the core. It was simply that I’d lost perhaps my oldest friend.

  These things, which I can really only now begin to speak of, remind a man of his fragile mortality. But luckily, there are other things—many other things, in my case—that give him joy.

  Everyone I shook hands with at the reunion seemed to have a delightful “Arnie Palmer” story to tell me. That’s how the homefolks know me—“Arnie” rather than “Arnold.” Many of these tales I’d heard before; others I’d somehow forgotten or—here’s the amusing part—maybe never even knew.

  We reminisced about the two-room schoolhouse in Youngstown where many of us went for eight grades before catching the trolley to high school in Latrobe, and someone remembered how on snowy days a gang of neighborhood kids would always come to our little house off the sixth fairway, where my mother would give everybody hot chocolate. Someone else—an old teammate from my abbreviated days on the gridiron—reminded me of how passionate my father was about my not playing football, stopping just shy of dragging me off the football field at Latrobe High because he thought football was the quickest way on earth to get permanently injured. A woman I hadn’t seen since the tenth grade remembered how I was so unspeakably shy in Miss Jones’s public speaking class that she forced me to stand before the class and asked me to explain the importance of making solid eye contact with the people I was addressing—something, come to think of it, I always try to do to this day. Another man recalled watching Winnie and me roll out of town one afternoon in 1955, pulling a small trailer behind our two-door Ford, headed for my first year on the Tour. I decided not to tell this man his memory was off a bit, that we didn’t actually buy the trailer he remembers in Latrobe. In fact, we bought the trailer outside Phoenix, Arizona, and returned home with it only at the end of the golf season, literally coasting down the last hill into Latrobe with a Ford whose engine was nearly shot from hauling that damned little house on wheels. “That’s right,” I told him, not wishing to disappoint him by correcting his memory. “That’s the same trailer Winnie insisted we park and never use again.”

  The stories flowed on and on, and each one, I must say, almost without my being aware of it, began to ease my worry. There was a lot of laughter and joking around, and a few tears shed, and all I could think as I made my way around the room to shake hands and share embraces and spin reminiscences was how my own parents would have thoroughly enjoyed being at this party. Pap, as we called my father, would have enjoyed the rough-and-tumble stories of life in old Latrobe, and my mother, given her deep compassion for people, would have known most if not all of the names of everybody in the building—and I daresay many of their most touching family stories, too.

  That’s small-town life for you. Perhaps not as true today as it once was in America, but still true in my hometown and perhaps yours, too.

  When the room quieted and I finally stood up to speak, I must say, my emotions nearly got the better of me. I briefly hesitated. But then I quickly recovered and the thoughts just seemed to stream straight from my heart to my lips. I thanked everyone for coming and specifically thanked Dolores Pohland for allowing me to copy off her paper so many years ago, thereby permitting me to graduate from Latrobe High—the room rocked with laughter at this. Then I admitted to them that for a number of reasons, some public and some private, I’d been shy about hosting the reunion and a bit worried about what I would say to everybody. I told them this was one of the most special evenings of my life. “We’ve all gone a lot of places since our days growing up here in Latrobe,” I said, looking at as many faces as I could. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all those years, it’s this: Your hometown is not where you’re from. It’s who you are.”

  They seemed to really appreciate this remark, applauding vigorously. When they quieted down again, I explained to them that this was why I still made Latrobe my home and would always come back, as I put it, until they spread my ashes out there somewhere near my Pap’s on one of the club’s fairways.

  Everybody laughed again. But they knew I couldn’t have been more serious.

  Then I thanked them for coming and gave them all umbrella pins, making everybody official members of Arnie’s Army.

  I should have known that Winnie would be right. The proper words had come to me in the nick of time, and I was deeply grateful for having been able to say them. A short while later, with the band going full tilt, we slipped out of the clubhouse and walked to our car in the darkness.

  “You did pretty well,” she said with that way she has of gently sticking the needle in me but also somehow meaning it.

  “I did, didn’t I?” I said, again with mock surprise. I was really pleased that what I had wanted to say had managed to come out all right.

  Winnie patted my hand reassuringly.

  Remembering one’s life, someone said, is to live twice. If that’s true, I realize I’ve been fortunate enough to live many lifetimes since I was a small boy following his dad around the fairways of Latrobe Country Club, that once-upon-a-time place where this tale really begins. Or maybe it really begins someplace before that.

  In any case, on the drive back down the hill to home and bed, I was thinking fondly about all the wonderful stories that had been swapped that clear September night. I loved hearing every one of them. The funny thing is, I hear these stories all over the world now. A few of them are even true.

  Of course, I have a few of my own to tell. If you have a little while, I’d like to tell you some of them.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Good Hands

  I sometimes think it’s odd, and in no small part revealing, what you manage not to forget. In almost fifty years of public life, the shape and strength of my hands have been written about hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times, by writers who saw them as metaphors for what I’ve accomplished and as clues to who I really am. True enough, they’re distinctive in that they are large, gnarled, and unusually strong. A blacksmith’s hands, they’ve been called. Good workingman’s hands. I got these hands from my father, Deacon Palmer.

  My two earliest memories involve my father and my hands. I was three years old and we were living in a small house across the street from my paternal grandparents, Alex and Agnes Palmer, on Kingston Street in Youngstown, a small working-class village just outside Latrobe. At that time my father was the head greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club, which he’d helped build with his own hands in the years just prior to my birth in September 1929. As an economic measure to combat the effects of the Great Depression, he would soon also be made “temporary” head professional by the club’s directors—a job he mana
ged to keep, and perform tirelessly, for over forty years until his death in 1976. But at that moment in time, my world was only about one block long, the distance between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ front porch.

  I loved to go over to my grandmother Agnes’s house, because she was a superb baker and always had a special treat for me and my little sister Lois Jean, whom everybody called Cheech. Sometimes it was a fresh piece of pie and chocolate milk, sometimes it was her terrific homemade bread and the wonderful apple butter she made from scratch. I remember a large grapevine growing just outside her kitchen door, and the tart jellies that came from those grapes. On this particular morning, I was carrying a quart of fresh milk up her three front steps when I stumbled and fell on the milk bottle, shattering the glass and slicing open nearly the entire side of my left hand. I remember being frightened, but I don’t remember the pain that surely must have come immediately afterward and as the doctor stitched me up.

  I suspect I may have cried—though perhaps not. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t, because even then I knew my father and grandfather were tough and seemingly unsentimental men, and I instinctively knew I wanted to be like them. My grandfather, Alex Jerome Palmer, was a housepainter by trade who served on the Youngstown school board and constantly fought for education funding—a fact that, considering his own minimal education, reveals something impressive about his character or at least his good common sense.

  Palmer men did things with their hands and were justifiably proud of that fact. According to family records, Palmers had been scraping out a living on small farms and in the coal mines of the rough Allegheny Mountains since the late 1780s, when they probably arrived in the area as English immigrants. Alex Palmer’s three sons were no different. They were strong willed and independent minded. My father, Milfred Jerome Palmer, was the oldest, followed by Uncle Francis, or “Spook,” and their kid brother, Harry, or “Dude,” Palmer. For years, at holiday or other family gatherings, whenever these three got together, an argument or debate of some kind was likely to erupt, fueled by blue-collar philosophy and beer. Uncle Francis later went to work for the management at Latrobe Steel, and Uncle Harry, a union man to the core, not only led a strike against the company that briefly turned into a rock-throwing melee, but took to calling his older brother a “scab” until my grandfather put an end to that. A little healthy disagreement was one thing, but Alex Palmer wasn’t going to tolerate rudeness at the family’s dinner table. He had firm ideas about how grown men should behave. Also present was their pair of sisters—my aunts Dorothy, or “Doll,” Palmer and Hazel, the baby sister. I remember how fondly they treated my sister Cheech and me at Thanksgiving and Christmas—the uncles bouncing us around, the aunts constantly trying to feed us more desserts or simply making a fuss over us.

  I don’t know who came up with “Cheech” for Lois Jean, but everyone (except perhaps for me) in those days seemed to have a nickname. Exactly how my father got his nickname—“Deacon” or, more commonly, “Deke”—remains a bit of a family mystery. Sometime back when he was a young man, he apparently helped out a local black minister in some kind of trouble, and people took to calling him “Deacon.” Perhaps the name was bestowed in derision or jest. No one knows for sure, and my father certainly wasn’t going to discuss it. In his view, someone else’s troubles were their own business, not a proper subject for public discussion.

  While a deacon is an elder of the church who helps the minister caretake the flock, my father never felt comfortable going to the little Lutheran church in Youngstown where Cheech and I were sent every Sunday from the time we could walk until confirmation at around age thirteen. I eventually came to learn that, even though he wasn’t a church-going man, our father really was a caretaker to many people around town. A man who took care of people regardless of their background or race. A deacon with strong hands. So the name stuck, and it suited him. As I say, most people simply called him Deke.

  I called him Pap from the beginning.

  Pap was the only Palmer son with a physical disability, a deformed foot from a bout of infantile paralysis that in those times was popularly referred to as a “game foot.” I’m convinced this only made him tougher, doubled his determination to be independent and strong. As a boy, he lifted weights and practiced chin-ups with one arm in order to build his upper-body strength. He could chin himself with either arm at least ten times, and his hands and upper torso, as a result, were splendidly muscled while his hips remained slim, his legs fairly weak.

  At about age fifteen, he quit school and went to work at American Locomotive in Latrobe (now Standard Steel) as a mail runner, but he didn’t like being indoors and heard somebody planned to build a golf course a couple of miles from his parents’ house in Youngstown. He knew nothing about golf, even less about growing grass or shaping fairways and greens, but he went out to the site of the new Latrobe Country Club and applied for a job as a laborer. He began his long career at Latrobe Country Club by literally digging ditches on a three-man construction crew.

  When the nine-hole course was more or less finished, in 1921, my father, then just seventeen, was asked by Latrobe Steel—which owned most of the stock in the new club—to stay on and help maintain the course. But there was a catch: the job wasn’t a year-round opportunity, and he would be laid off when the golf season ended. After tearing down, cleaning, and repainting every piece of the club’s maintenance equipment, he remedied this shortfall by finding a second job running the poolroom at the Youngstown Hotel, a pretty rough-and-tumble place where local workingmen, including several Polish and Slovak men who would eventually come to work for him at the golf course and become like surrogate uncles to me, relaxed and drank shots of whiskey with their beers, wagered on pool, and sometimes got into fistfights. Thanks to his weight lifting, Pap was a young bull nobody dared give much lip to.

  Pap’s personality and character, I see now, from the vantage point of many years, undoubtedly was shaped by those years struggling to teach himself to walk again, long before there were doctors and rehabilitation programs to help people manage the various difficulties associated with types of polio. His father drilled into him the importance of doing a job to the best of your abilities, never complaining about your lot, and always conducting yourself with as much dignity as possible. Early in his married life to my mother, for example, Pap worked a second job at night in the steel mill to bring in extra family income. According to Mother and others, he worked so hard (at a job he hated, no less) he sometimes angered the other workers, and one night some fella tried to spill molten metal on him. I don’t know what came of that incident, but if I’d been that man I sure wouldn’t have wanted to have met Pap in the alleyway after work that night.

  Because of his handicap, Pap learned he had to be tougher than the next fellow, regardless of his social position. As a result, I think, he developed even more rigid beliefs about what was right and what was wrong, what a good man did or didn’t do. You didn’t borrow money. You didn’t take what wasn’t yours; you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal. If you did any of those things, you weren’t anybody in Deacon Palmer’s eyes.

  Once, as a boy of about five, I lifted a packet of glue from the drugstore in Youngstown, just slipped it into my pocket and sidled nonchalantly out the door. I was nuts about building model airplanes in those days. Anyway, I’d barely reached the pavement out front when I began to worry that someone had seen me or would somehow find out and tell my pap what I’d done. The truly amazing thing is, I worried about that theft for the next sixty-five years, and the truth is I still worry a little bit that my father, wherever he is, will somehow find out I took that glue and lower the boom on me.

  Pap wasn’t big on spanking either Cheech or me. He left that task to our mother, Doris Palmer—and she did it only once, as far as I can remember, when Cheech and I burst out laughing at her after she tried to discipline us for some rules infraction. But the sound of his voice—combined with the size of his hands and their po
tential menace—was almost enough to freeze me in my tracks and set my bony knees quaking when I was caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

  I began this reflection by saying I had two earliest memories involving Pap and hands. Here is the other one: When I was three, perhaps just before or some time after the broken milk bottle incident, my father put my hands in his and placed them around the shaft of a cut-down women’s golf club. He showed me the classic overlap, or Vardon, grip—the proper grip for a good golf swing, he said—and told me to hit the golf ball. Because the Vardon grip involves overlapping the small finger of one hand on the index finger of the other, it’s not the easiest grip for a small-fry to master. But an easier, baseball, grip would never have done, so I worked hard to learn the grip Pap showed me. It probably helped that my hands were larger than the average kid’s.

  His initial thoughts on the golf swing weren’t complicated, though. “Hit it hard, boy,” he said simply. “Go find it and hit it hard again.”

  Pap took basic lessons from the Latrobe Country Club’s first professional, a Scotsman named Davy Brand, and spent years refining his own swing enough to become a solid single-digit handicapper. Even though by this time he was regularly giving lessons to members, that was pretty much all the swing instruction he gave me for many years. Get the right grip. Hit the ball hard. Go find the ball, boy, and hit it hard again …