A Golfer's Life Read online

  From the beginning I took his advice to heart and swung at the ball so hard I often toppled over. I remember how a prominent member once saw me take a cut at the ball and commented to him, “Deacon, you better do something about that kid’s swing. He swings so hard, he can’t even stay on his feet.” Without missing a beat, my pap leveled his gaze at this member and told him in no uncertain terms, “Dammit, J.R., you let me worry about the kid and you take care of your own game, all right?” Years later, after I began to have some success in junior golf and even when I was first playing on the PGA Tour, well-meaning people would watch me slug a golf ball with my unique and essentially homemade golf swing—a corkscrewing motion that relied almost entirely on my great upper-body strength, producing low-boring shots that seldom rose above eye level and flew a long way in the form of a bold draw and the occasional monstrous hook—and offer me tips and insights about how I could improve and refine it. Others marveled that it worked as well as it did.

  A case in point is an incident that took place on the practice tee at Chick Harbert’s club in Detroit during my rookie year on the Tour in 1955. I was hitting balls with my driver when I realized George Fazio and Tony Penna were standing there watching me. I knew Fazio a bit—he once gave me a lift when I was hitchhiking back to Wake Forest, a funny story I’ll get to in a while—but Penna was a ball-striking legend. I really wanted to show off, so I teed up some balls and let out the shaft, pounding drives to the rear of the range.

  I heard Penna ask Fazio if he knew who I was.

  “Sure. That’s this kid Arnold Palmer. He just won the National Amateur.”

  “Well, better tell him to get a job,” Penna said with unmistakable disdain, almost mockery. “With that swing of his, he’ll never make it out here.”

  I really burned inside at that remark. Many years later, after I’d won the Bob Hope Classic for the third time, I saw Tony again. He came up to me and winked and said, in that same slightly mocking voice, “Palmer, you’re beginning to swing that club pretty good.”

  I guess I was. The point is, early on my views about the golf swing—and, for that matter, life in general—were shaped by a man who believed in the virtues of hard work and following the rules but essentially doing things your own way in this world.

  Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing—and it’s a tribute to him that anytime I ever got in trouble with my swing, lost the feel or touch in a shot, it was usually because I became enamored of some popular teacher’s ideas about the “mechanics” of the golf swing and gave their advice a try, often really screwing myself up for a time.

  Mine was, and remains, almost the antithesis of a “mechanical” golf swing. Everybody has their theories about what makes a good golf swing, but Pap’s basic premise was that once you learned the proper grip and understood the fundamental motion behind the swing, the trick was to find the swing that worked best for you and your body type, maximized your power. The rest of it was a lifelong learning process of refinement by trial and error, seeing what worked by how the club felt in your hands. Even at the pinnacle of my success in the middle 1960s, I would be practicing at Latrobe for hours, beating balls like you wouldn’t believe, and look up to discover him watching me. Typically, he might make some small comment about my swing, but overall he didn’t have much to say on the subject. It was inconceivable to think of a Sam Snead or Byron Nelson consulting a swing doctor or even asking another Tour professional for advice on their golf swings. As Ben Hogan later said, the answer was in the dirt, and pounding balls was the only way to find it. That was pretty much my father’s attitude, too. And it inevitably became mine.

  If that sounds simple, my father prided himself on simple, clear logic—a way of looking at life that I eventually accepted as “Deacon’s gospel.” Not surprisingly, he had the same simple reverence for the rules of the game. The rules were there to be followed, because that meant the game would be the same kind of challenge for everybody. Beating an opponent was meaningless unless it was done by the rule book. Unless winter rules were in effect or an area had been designated as under repair, for example, improving a lie would have been utterly unthinkable to him. Wherever you hit the ball and found it, that was the spot you played your next shot from. No casual rolling the ball in the rough or fairway. He was as rigid and unyielding on the rules of the game as any USGA official I ever knew, and that’s one reason I learned the rules thoroughly at an early age, something that would benefit me enormously down the road in my career.

  Because Pap was both head professional and course superintendent, he knew what it took to both build and maintain a golf course. He preached relentlessly on the importance of replacing divots and repairing pitchmarks, and woe be unto the player—regardless of whether it was his own son or the club president—who failed to treat the golf course with the kind of respect Pap deemed necessary and proper.

  Pap’s other big concern was manners—how you behaved in the presence of your superiors or while eating and certainly the way in which you conducted yourself on the golf course. At the dinner table or in the company of grown-ups, for example, a kid didn’t speak until he was spoken to, and he or she had better eat every scrap of food they bothered to take on their plate. You also had to hold your knife and fork properly, or he’d go through the roof. And God forbid you dared to enter a dwelling or be in the presence of a woman and forget to remove your cap. Pap would snatch it off and take part of your scalp with it! Cheech and I both learned these cardinal rules early in life—and in my case sometimes the hard way.

  Likewise, from the beginning it was also drilled into me that a golf course was a place where character fully reveals itself—both its strengths and its flaws. As a result, I learned early not only to fix my ball marks but also to congratulate an opponent on a good shot, avoid walking ahead of a player preparing to shoot, remain perfectly still when someone else was playing, and a score of other small courtesies that revealed, in my father’s mind, one’s abiding respect for the game. In a nutshell, Pap had no patience with people who chose to ignore the rules and traditions that made golf the most gentlemanly game on earth. Especially if the offender was me.

  As I got older and began to work at the golf course myself, I also began to build my upper-body strength, just as he had done, from pushing heavy greens mowers and raking and cleaning out ditches, and eventually the same well-meaning members warned me that building shoulder and arm muscles like Pap’s would eventually ruin my golf swing. As near as I can tell, it never did. In fact, I never lifted weights to build muscle until my senior career started in the early 1980s.

  I simply wanted good hands like his, the hands that shaped Latrobe Country Club.

  But all that came a bit later, of course. To begin with, as I say, my introduction to golf came when I started swinging myself out of my shoes with that old cut-down ladies’ club at age three and was taken by my father to the golf course, where I was permitted to ride on his lap while he was mowing fairways with gangmowers pulled by the club’s old Fordson steel-wheeled tractor.

  Red Yazvec and Slim Balko worked for Pap, and sometimes I think they helped raise me, or at least taught me to curse in Slovak and to fight. They would tease me into such a froth of anger, I would run and jump on them and pound them with my fists. They were both big friendly men, and I remember how, when everyone broke to eat lunch and drink fresh cold milk under the trees, they would often get to horsing around and wrestling with Pap. Thanks to his massive upper-body strength, they simply couldn’t overpower him, and he’d nail them every time. I loved that.

  Another man, Charlie Arch, more or less kept an eye on me when my father was busy. Charlie worked in the club pro shop. He was born with malformed arms that were very short and with no elbow joint, and he had only four fingers on each hand. He was such a great and generous guy, we became friends almost instantly. For years when I needed money, Charlie wo
uld always come through and “advance” me ten or twenty without telling my father about it. Pap didn’t believe in borrowing money you couldn’t pay back, and he would have been livid if he found out I’d accepted Charlie’s little loans. What nobody but me knew was that I was careful to keep track of how much Charlie advanced me over the years, hoping the day would soon come when I could pay him back. Eventually the sum came to around $600. The year I married Winnie and started playing the Tour and made a few bucks, I gave Charlie Arch a check for $1,000 and sincerely thanked him.

  There were other men who benefited from Pap’s caretaking. Slim Balko’s brother, Paulie, worked at the club for a time, as did Jack Byerly, whose brother, R. A. Byerly, was an engineer at Latrobe Steel and a lifelong friend of Pap’s—they were so close, in fact, that my parents chose to use his middle name, Arnold, when naming me. Then there was Pickles Vilk, a coal miner who got injured and came to the club, where he worked as a caddie for the rest of his life.

  Pap was protective of his employees. By the time my sister Lois Jean and I came along, he had clearly earned the respect and friendship of the club’s most prominent members, like Harry Saxman and Dr. H. R. Mather, and he often spent his Friday nights playing poker with men who were the movers and shakers in Latrobe and the surrounding area, businessmen, steel executives, and so forth. These well-attended poker games became legendary, but I think it was his friendships with Slim and Red and Jack Byerly and the rest of them, who were such a major part of our day-to-day lives, that meant the most to him.

  He loved drinking “shots and beer” and shooting pool with his buddies at the firehall or Amer’s Hotel in Youngstown, and in the winter, when the club closed its doors, thanks to his connections in town, Pap was able to find most of these fellows good-paying jobs in the steel mills or, after the repeal of prohibition, the Latrobe Brewing Company. Some of the jobs he found them were so good, they never came back to the golf course. One of the Balko boys, for example, went to a management job at the steel mill and never came back. Red Yazvec started a tire business in Youngstown that’s going to this day. But they obviously never forgot what Deke Palmer had done for them, because I heard it straight from their mouths for decades.

  The year I turned six, we moved to a small frame house adjacent to Nine Mile Run and the old sixth hole at the golf course, and I began walking the mile or so up the hill and through the village to the two-room Baldridge School. I had to pass my grandmother Palmer’s house on the way, and every time I got into a fistfight with a playmate like Bert Lambert, Karl Burkhart, or Berkey Shirey, it seemed to happen directly in front of Grandma Palmer’s house.

  Even then I had a strong temper, and though I usually wound up on top, there was a curious aspect to my fighting: I never could really bring myself to try to hurt an opponent. Instead, I would just kind of sit on them and warn them, “Now, look. Give up or I’m going to have to hit you,” and that usually did the trick. By then, of course, it was usually too late for me to avoid my father’s wrath, because my grandmother had called home or the club to report, “Arnie’s fightin’ in the street again,” and my father would stop what he was doing and come get me.

  Curiously enough, I can think of only a couple times my father actually laid a hand on me. The first time was when I was about nine or ten, and it involved another scrap in the village with a kid named Jimmy McCracken. Pap was in the Amer’s bar having a drink with his friends, and I was outside arguing with Jimmy McCracken when fists began to fly. Pretty quick I had Jimmy on the ground, warning him to give up or else, when a hand suddenly pulled me off him. It was Fat Rusnak, an older man who knew my father. Fat told me to quit picking on Jimmy because I was bigger than my opponent, and I told him to let me go. He refused to do it. We happened to be standing in front of the village grocery store, and a display of fresh fruit was out front. Desperate to get free and back to my business, I impulsively grabbed a peach—a very ripe peach, as my poor luck would have it—and smashed it on the front of Fat’s shirt, smearing it all over, really ruining the shirt.

  Fat let me go and disappeared into the Amer’s bar, and a few moments later my father appeared and just from the look on his face I knew I was in big trouble. Because it was raining, Pap had an umbrella with him, and he used that big umbrella to whack my butt all the way down the hill to our house, probably half a mile at least. I can still feel the sting of that umbrella, and I never quite forgave Fat Rusnak for turning me in to Pap. A dozen years or so ago, Fat dropped by Latrobe Country Club just to say hello, and I told him, “What are you doing here! Thanks to you I got my rear end smacked all the way down the hill, and I want you to know I haven’t forgotten it!”

  We had a laugh about that—but the truth is, I wasn’t really kidding.

  One other time I remember wasn’t the least bit amusing. In fact, it was pretty terrifying. But it says something about the place and time I was from—as well as the direction I was headed in life.

  The incident happened on my sixteenth birthday. Pap came home to dinner after having a few drinks with his friends and began picking at my mother. He sometimes did this, nitpicked at her about this or that after a few drinks and a hard day at the club. I hated when he was drunk, because alcohol often brought out a side of him none of us liked to see. It troubled me that the man who rode me so hard about knowing the difference between right and wrong often did something—after too many shots at the firehall—he knew was wrong.

  Well, on this particular evening I decided I’d had enough of it. I didn’t like it one bit, and I stood up and told him flat out that I didn’t like the way he was talking to my mother. I insisted that he leave her alone. I remember how he looked at me with surprise and then rage. Cheech and I, as I said, were raised to be seen and not heard, and it was unthinkable that I would challenge him in his house. Almost before I knew what hit me, Pap grabbed me by the shirt and lifted me off the floor with those massive hands of his and slammed me against a galvanized stovepipe, flattening it against the wall, scaring the living daylights out of me.

  Perhaps it scared him too. These days some people might regard such violence as an act of child abuse, and I think even then my father realized he’d gone too far. Some part of him may have even admired the way I’d stood up to him—Pap admired toughness based on principle. In any case, the evening was in shambles, and a little later that night I ran away from home.

  I grabbed a few things and slipped out of the house, trying to cool down and figure out which direction to go. I don’t even remember if I took my golf clubs, to tell the truth. I was sixteen and regularly winning my high school golf matches, but I had no clue where to go to find a more interesting life, so I followed Nine Mile Run for a while and then wandered around the golf course for several more hours until I realized I simply had no place else I really wanted to go.

  For better or worse, my father’s house was my home. It was where I belonged. A little while later, I let myself back into the house and climbed quietly into bed. In the morning, my father didn’t say a word about the incident. He never mentioned it again.

  And he never laid a hand on me in anger again, either.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mother

  Not too long after we moved to the golf course and I started first grade at the Baldridge School, Mother went to work as the club’s bookkeeper and took up golf. She usually played in the early evenings after dinner with the Bouches, Matt and May. Pap would go back to the club to give an evening lesson, and I was free to tag along after her.

  My mother wasn’t a good player, but she was as patient as the day is long and I owe my first playing experiences on a golf course entirely to her. One of five daughters, Doris Palmer was a classic “people” person, interested in just about everyone and everything, always enthusiastic in her approach to life, and she never met a stranger she didn’t like. I’m deeply flattered when people who knew us both say I inherited her personality, for she was magnetic and charming and nobody ever had a bad word to say about her.<
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  I don’t remember a lot about those early outings with the Bouches, to be honest, except how much fun they were and how great it was to be with my mother, because I was anxious to show off for her. I was clearly the apple of her eye, and almost anything I did seemed to thrill her. Many years later, when reporters commented on a mannerism that became a kind of personal signature, hitching up my pants while stalking up a fairway in the heat of competition, I often explained that it was simply a means of handling nervous tension, something to do with my hands between shots. In fact, it was a reflex that dates from those first outings onto the golf course at Latrobe with my mother and the Bouches, when she would look over at me chugging to keep up and affectionately chide: “Hey, fella. Pull up those britches before they fall off you.”

  She always called me “fella.” No aspiring golfer ever had a greater, more nurturing golf mom.

  Maybe more important, though, given the restrictions inherent in my father’s position as the club’s head professional, she instinctively knew how important it was for me to actually play the golf course. I was paid a nickel to shag balls on the practice range, and when I wasn’t with Pap or one of his work crews I sometimes was permitted to hack a ball around in the rough. Occasionally, when nobody was looking, I’d sneak onto a putting green for a few stolen moments of practice. But actually playing on the golf course when any of the members were present was another matter, strictly forbidden, simply out of the question.

  The same policy applied to the club swimming pool. Cheech and I were employee children and therefore were never afforded the privilege of swimming there. Our swimming place was Nine Mile Run, the rock-edged stream that skirted the golf course and our house near the old sixth hole. Ironically, that creek was the source of the pool’s water, and our favorite running joke for years was that we at least got to pee in the club’s swimming pool water before the country club kids did.