A Life Well Played Read online

  I definitely think I could have won more major titles, not because of the way I handled things but because of the way I lost the ability to handle things. I probably hit the ball better from 1965 to 1974 than I did when I was winning my major championships. I had greater control of the ball and drove it better. In short, I was very happy with my ball striking, and I still won a number of tournaments.

  But I didn’t win another major after the 1964 Masters, and I had plenty of chances to do that, including several U.S. Opens. The difference was that I lost my edge mentally. I just wasn’t as sharp in my thinking and concentration. I can attribute that partly to a certain amount of satisfaction that I was feeling. My win at Cherry Hills was a career-defining moment for me. And that win took away a bit of my edge. Not much, mind you, but just a tiny bit. My fourth Masters title in ’64 gave me more Green Jackets than anyone else in history at the time. But more significantly, I won with a comfortable lead. In my previous three wins, I had to fight down to the wire with all the pressure in the world on my shoulders. I didn’t get to enjoy the moment. In 1964, ahead by six strokes, I made the walk up the hill to the 18th green knowing that I was going to win. It was wonderful.

  I truly believe I might have won more if not for those experiences, winning those two tournaments in such meaningful fashion. That’s not to say I’d give them back. But I’m admitting here that they had an adverse effect on how I approached the rest of my career. I still wanted to win badly, yet I sensed a diminished fire inside me.

  It might have only cost me a shot or two over 72 holes, but two shots lost are all it takes to go from winning to a second-place finish. And I had 61 of those.

  Yes, I was runner-up almost as many times as I was the winner, and when I’ve been asked about it, I don’t find it at all a moral victory to have come so close so often. It isn’t failure, either. It’s just not getting the job done when winning was all I ever cared about. And I can trace it all to the mental side of the game.

  This should tell you how important that six inches between your ears really is. If I had been as sharp mentally as I was in the early part of my career, and you combined that with the sharpness of my ball striking a bit later, I think I would have won a lot more. I wish I could go back and change that.

  But as for how I went about my job—connecting with the fans, laughing, having fun on the golf course, treating the sponsors and the press and tournament staff like friends or extended family—that part I wouldn’t change one iota.

  TOOLS

  I ALWAYS FELT LIKE if I could build the perfect golf club, then I should be able to hit the perfect shot and play the perfect game. That’s unrealistic, but it never kept me from trying to achieve it. If someone was going to build one, I wanted it to be me.

  I got engaged in club repair and club building at a very young age under the tutelage of the golf pro—my father, who taught me every detail about how to work in the shop. I quickly found I had an ability to work with clubs, and at Latrobe Country Club, repairing clubs for members became one of my regular tasks. And I did a lot of experimenting to learn what worked and what didn’t. I’d put them together and take them apart. Most people thought that I was a lot better at taking them apart. I will admit that I was never much of a handyman around the house, but I knew what to do with golf clubs. As my good friend Charlie Mechem once said about me, “Everyone has something that mesmerizes them. For Arnold, it’s been golf equipment. It’s at the center of his being.” It would be hard for me to disagree.

  When my interest in clubs grew, so did my tinkering. I never had new golf clubs until I was old enough to buy them. So the ones I did have I tinkered with often, and I learned about the playing characteristics of clubs and how to change them through my own trial and error. In high school I was given a set of clubs by a doctor in Latrobe named Homer Mather, who was a member of the club and a good friend of the family. I used them throughout high school, and I can’t tell you how many times I bent, sanded, taped, and re-gripped them. And when I turned professional, I did the same thing with my first sets of Wilson clubs. I never used a stock club; they just didn’t feel right.

  Mark McCormack once said that if a wizard gave me a divining rod that would point to gold in the ground I would take it home and start fiddling with it so it would point to diamonds, too.

  In my heyday I traveled with a vise and a hammer in my car and made repairs anywhere I could find a place to work. An uncle who was a steelworker made a tool for me out of stainless steel that I used to bend the hosel of his irons, making what is known as offset, a condition in which the neck of the iron is in front of the face of the club. To steady my nerves before a big round, particularly the final round of a major championship, I would re-grip all of my clubs. And I always brought along an extra set on tour so I had something to work on in my spare time, because that perfect club sometimes just couldn’t wait.

  I’ve mentioned that Ben Hogan and I didn’t exactly have a warm and fuzzy relationship, but after I won a couple of Masters and the U.S. Open we at least were cordial to the point that he let me borrow a driver from him. It was an excellent driver, but it wasn’t Arnold Palmer’s driver until I refinished the club head, put more loft on the face, and gave it more of a gooseneck look. I also built up the grip and shortened the shaft a bit. I won a lot of tournaments with that driver. Some time later when Ben saw the club, he took it out of my bag, waggled it, and said, “What have you done to my club? You’ve ruined a good driver.”

  Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or in the eye of the guy with the hammer, vise, and file. I had plenty of ideas for improving clubs, but not all of them worked out. But I did have some commercial successes when I had my own equipment company, the Arnold Palmer Golf Company. One was the Patented Hosel Design iron. Known as the PHD, it was created with the help of Clay Long, an independent designer who also made some clubs for Jack Nicklaus. The iron had a tab of metal on the hosel that allowed weight to be removed from around the face and relocated past the heel of the club. It was basically an oversized game-improvement iron, one of the first of its kind. There was a lot more than just playing better golf that lured me to the workshop. I found refuge and renewal when I went off by myself to tinker with my clubs. One is that I was working with my hands trying to refine something to make it better, which took precision and concentration. The second benefit is that my mind was thrown deeply in the flavor of golf—not necessarily the competitive trials of a particular day or round, but simply golf in deep, enduring, visceral terms that rose out of my childhood. I was going back to my roots, and that is something soothing and inspiring.

  Over the years, as I’ve changed equipment, manufactured my own with the Arnold Palmer Golf Company (which I eventually sold), and received plenty of others from all corners of the globe, I’ve managed to acquire quite a collection. By a conservative estimate, I must have more than 10,000 clubs and 2,000 putters stored away in buildings and workshops in Latrobe and Orlando. In my workshop in Latrobe, just a few steps from my office, I have hundreds of clubs in bags and in bins, some of which are in various states of transformation. In the basement of my office in Latrobe I have hundreds of club heads waiting for me to put together with shafts and grips. I might get around to working with them someday.

  Working with golf clubs wasn’t just a function of being a professional golfer. To me it was fun, and I looked at each club I worked on as if I were molding a work of art. Just like my golf game, I was always trying to improve my equipment, too, and that gave me the sense that I was improving on me as I improved on them. I think that is the essence of life—always striving to do something better. Or even perfectly.

  HIT IT IN THE HOLE

  EVERY TIME I’VE EVER HIT a shot, I tried to hit it in the hole. That includes a tee shot on a par-5. Now, that wouldn’t have been very realistic, but that’s how I hit every shot in my mind’s eye.

  I think this might be one of the best thoughts you can have when playing golf, because it really
focuses your mind on the ultimate goal. I know over the years it was an effective psychological tool for me. Sam Snead even accused me once of this very thing. I didn’t try to dissuade him. That’s how I played competitive golf. It was another part of my aggressive identity as a golfer.

  There was one important part to my growth as a golfer, and it was this mind-set. When I got out on tour, I was playing a game where I always wanted to beat the ball at the target all the time, but I grew into a player who was capable of beating it at the hole. I went out on tour thinking this way because it was the only game I really knew, and I adapted my game to what I needed to do. But I truly believe I adapted because of how I thought about the game.

  You think hard enough about hitting the ball in the hole and you tend to actually do it.

  I guess my approach might be akin to Harvey Penick’s advice about taking dead aim—with a bit of my own twist to it. Next time you play, let your goal be to try to hit it in the hole. It will simultaneously sharpen your focus and yet free you up to make a swing that is less mechanical or self-consciously driven.

  INSTRUCTIONS ON INSTRUCTION

  I’M THE WORST ADVOCATE for swing coaches, probably, in the world. It’s not that I am against instruction, and I think swing instructors are very important to many people starting out in the game. Because of my close association with the PGA of America through the years, I’m a huge supporter of PGA professionals and the important role they play in growing the game and introducing people to playing the game the right way.

  But I’ve never bought into this idea that the young players on the tours need instructional gurus out there helping them, and I am probably least in favor of their growing proliferation on driving ranges at golf tournaments.

  All the instructors in the audience will say, “Arnie, stop it” because they’re making a hell of a living out of giving instruction. I understand that. I’m not trying to get in the way or impede anyone’s ability to make a living. But I think it’s gone a little overboard, this babysitting, almost, of a player. And it’s not really the instructor’s fault. Players ask for the help, and it seems they want their instructors hovering over them.

  Every teacher thinks he has the system he thinks is best, and there are so many that you can’t count them. But eventually you have to figure some things out for yourself. Is another set of eyes a good idea? I think so. But if you can’t go out on the range and make some adjustments on your own, build your own set of fundamentals and depend on yourself, you still might do pretty well, but I would argue that you’re never going to be a consistently good player.

  Depending on my own system is what carried me through my career. I got that system from my father, who also taught me to drive a tractor and cut fairways at Latrobe Country Club. My father taught me basic fundamentals of the game of golf. The main instruction that he gave me from the day I started playing golf was stick to the basic fundamentals. Like you’ve heard it a dozen times, when he put my hands on the club, he said, “Boy, don’t you ever change that.”

  Well, basically I haven’t. And I think that if you are really serious about playing golf and playing good golf, stick to the basic fundamentals. Sure, there’s going to be a little change here and a change there, but you should stick to the things that you started with and you learned and you know how to apply them to your game.

  In late 1954, when I left to go on the tour, my father wasn’t too anxious for me to go. I said, “I’m going on tour, Pap.” He said, “Okay. Be tough, boy. Go out and play your own game. If you start listening to other people’s [advice] and all those guys out there, that tractor is still sitting down there and you can drive it when you come back.”

  Well, I never went back because I did what he told me. Basic fundamentals. If you feel like you’re getting the basic fundamentals when you start, and you think you’re right and you’ve got a pretty good swing going for you, stick with it. Don’t listen to all the instruction you can get.

  My thought always was to create and execute good shots, one at a time. Not perfect swings, but keeping it simple with basic fundamentals that produced the good golf shots, and that served me well.

  But I have seen many fellow competitors get twisted into knots, trying new things and searching for that magical swing. In fact, some unfortunate fellows just overthought themselves right off the tour and out of competitive golf. More recently, I have seen what Tiger Woods has done, how he has switched golf instructors a couple of times, and he indeed looks like he’s twisted himself into knots. He had such a great golf swing, and while it’s easy for me to say he should have stuck with it, I think the evidence is pretty clear that he would have benefited from a bit less intervention from the so-called “experts” out there.

  Now, I have had discussions with some golf professionals through the years, and on occasion I have taken something that they have suggested and thought about it and made slight adjustments. But these were things that I did on my own, things I integrated into my own system. I still stayed with my overall fundamentals, and I never had anyone standing behind me critiquing my every swing. It was still my game. As a result, I trusted what I was doing, because it was all on me and I was figuring it out for myself. I think it turned out okay.

  JACK

  I COULD WRITE A BOOK about my rivalry with Jack Nicklaus. Inasmuch as there already have been books written about it, I’ll refrain. The attempts to decipher our relationship, break it down psychologically, analyze our words and body language, have been amusing to me because people continually are looking for things that just aren’t there, that never have been there.

  The facts are fairly straightforward and simple: Jack Nicklaus was my greatest competition in golf, both on the course during my peak years and off it as our business interests intersected from time to time, most notably in golf course design. Honest and fair competition is a wonderful thing, and as central to the American way of thinking as anything, and Jack and I are two intensely competitive individuals who had the same pursuits and goals in our professional lives.

  I liked Jack from the very beginning. We met in Ohio when he was still a teenager, during an exhibition in 1958 in Athens honoring my good friend Dow Finsterwald. When Jack was thinking of turning pro, he came to me for some advice, and I helped him as much as I could. Some things I told him worked out pretty well for him, and some of the things I told him didn’t work out.

  I knew how good Jack could be, and I think the world learned that early on when he won two U.S. Amateurs and was my primary adversary at Cherry Hills in the 1960 U.S. Open. When he broke through and beat me in 1962 at Oakmont, the sting of that defeat was sharp. But it wasn’t surprising, because he had to start winning eventually. I just wish he hadn’t done it in that particular event, in my backyard of sorts outside Pittsburgh.

  One of the things that Nicklaus did that was very impressive was that he handled himself very well. He might have made a lot of people mad because he beat me on occasion, but on the golf course he was very good and played the way he wanted to play, and off the course he stayed on the right road and was an exemplary person. We did become friends, and we played a lot of golf together, and we played cards together with our wives, and we traveled together to a lot of exhibitions early on, many times with me picking him up in my plane and taking him to wherever we were playing.

  All that being said, there was nobody I ever wanted to beat more, and I think Jack felt the same way about me. Because of that, and because of how we both conducted ourselves throughout our careers toward each other, I think Jack and I have been very good for each other and very good for the game of golf in general. Our rivalry happened at a time when golf was just beginning to take deep root in the broader American sports psyche, and the intensity of our competition, as well as our distinctly different personalities, created tremendous natural drama. The sporting public really took to us.

  We knew we were good theater, and we enjoyed it at least as much as the fans and the reporters. And Mark McCormack,
my good friend and the founder of International Management Group, knew we were good theater, too, which is why Jack and I traveled all over the world playing in exhibitions. And each and every time I played against him, whether it was an exhibition or a major championship, I wanted to beat him to a pulp, and I knew he felt the same way, and that always energized the both of us. That’s the nature of healthy sportsmanship and the spirit of tournament golf. That’s just the way it should be, too.

  But believe me when I say that despite the pain of losing major tournaments to each other and the wild swings in fortune that defined our relationship, we had a lot of fun being in the center of all that attention. And neither one of us ever lost sight of what it was all about, which was sports and competition, not life and death. That meant that the guy who lost always was able to congratulate the guy who won with all sincerity. Likewise, the winner, understanding the disappointment the other man was feeling, was able to be humble and kind.

  I can’t think of a better way to behave whatever side of the fence you end up on in your daily pursuits. And because of that, we ended up being good partners when we played on the same team together in the Ryder Cup or Canada Cup. We won the latter together on four occasions, and we also combined to capture the PGA Team Championship three times. After winning the 1971 Team Championship at Laurel Valley by a record six shots in wire-to-wire fashion—one week after my wire-to-wire win at Westchester—I was asked if there was any chance that Jack and I would break up the partnership. “Not so far as I know,” I responded. “Why would we do that?”

  Were there the occasional moments when we were at odds with each other? I think when two people are friends and yet rivals, there will be moments of disagreement. Like I said, we are very different individuals, but we had one important thing in common: we both benefited from strong father figures who taught us the importance of sportsmanship. I think the fact that we were more than ten years apart in age was a benefit to both of us. And, truthfully, we had not one but two things in common. Each of us married a terrific woman, and Winnie and Barbara Nicklaus became very close friends. They were truly our better halves, and I know Jack would agree with me on this point 100 percent.