A Golfer's Life Read online

  I was surprised by my father’s quick response—and so, I’m sure, was J. R. Larson.

  “Don’t tell me what to do with my kid,” Pap snarled at him, perhaps recalling his own time in the steel mills. “You take care of your business, Mr. Larson, and I’ll take care of mine.”

  That was Pap’s philosophy to a T, and he didn’t back down from anybody, including powerful club members. For some head professionals that might have been the kiss of death, but on more than one occasion I overheard him say to Harry Saxman, his boss and the club’s longtime president, “Harry, if you don’t like the way I’m doing the job, feel free to go hire somebody else.”

  They never did, of course. They knew they would never find a man who worked harder and understood Latrobe Country Club the way Deacon Palmer did.

  It was also about this time that I started reading books about golf, instruction books and biographies about the game’s greatest players, picking up ideas here or there, even beginning to seriously fantasize about a professional career of my own. I was naturally drawn to the exploits of Bob Jones, and I remember thinking if I could fashion a golf career along the lines of his, that would be a dream come true. Byron Nelson’s writing, his ideas about the golf swing and the way he’d come up through the game from the caddie yard to stardom and treated the game with such personal grace, also had a tremendous influence on me. That still wouldn’t stop me from beating him or Ben Hogan or Sam Snead or anybody else on the course at Latrobe, though, and sometimes whipping them pretty soundly, on the perfect fairways of my vivid daydreams. I sometimes played two balls, for instance, one for Ben Hogan, say, and one for me: Palmer versus Hogan for the PGA Championship; or one for Byron and one for this brash young upstart named Arnie Palmer with the National Open Championship hanging in the balance. I was such a big dreamer in those days, perhaps because I was alone so much of the time on the course. Sometimes I think that kids these days could really use less planned activities and fewer structured choices and more time alone—time to develop their imaginations, play games, and find out who they really are. Years later, musing about those slow boyhood days, I joked to a reporter that I lost a lot of Opens on the fairways of my imagination. But I won more than my share, too.

  My first junior tournament took place the summer I was twelve, at Shannopin Country Club in Pittsburgh. A slightly older golf buddy named Tommy Smith drove us in his parents’ car to the tournament, but when we got there we encountered an unexpected problem. Just before I was scheduled to tee off, I was informed that I was ineligible to play because the tournament was sponsored by the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association, and Latrobe Country Club didn’t belong to the association.

  I was stunned, crushed, and angry. I rushed to a phone and called Pap and told him what had happened. He told me to calm down and stay close to the phone. A few minutes later he called back to say he’d spoken with Harry Saxman, who also belonged to nearby Greensburg Country Club. Greensburg, where Tommy Smith’s family belonged, happened to belong to the West Penn Golf Association, and Harry’s novel solution was that I would be declared an “instant” member of Greensburg Country Club by head professional Perry Delvecchio—and hence be eligible to play.

  I shot 82 in the qualifying round, good enough for third or fourth qualifier. I thought that made me pretty hot stuff, to tell the truth, and in the first match the next day I drew a guy named Jack Kunkle from St. Clair Country Club in Pittsburgh. Jack was two years older than me, one of two golfing brothers—the other was named Bob—I would play with for years at junior tournaments around Pittsburgh. I watched Jack hit his first drive off the tee, a blast that sliced straight into the trees, and smiled. I was so cocky that I was sure I already had him beaten, especially since my drive found the heart of the fairway.

  Off we went, with Jack in trouble and me already feeling the match was mine. A few hours later, Jack waltzed me in 4 and 3, and I’d learned one of the most valuable lessons of my career: Never take any opponent for granted on a golf course. It was a dose of humility I needed and carry to this day. Play your own game, as my father would have counseled, and mind your own business and you’ll do much better. You control what you do, not what the other guy does. The only good news was that I didn’t need to worry about how I would get to Pittsburgh the rest of the week because I was out of the tournament.

  When I was thirteen, my year was full of a lot of junior golf tournament experiences like that around Pittsburgh, Greensburg, and Ligonier, where I met strong junior players I would compete against for years and forged many lasting friendships. My mother used to drive me to these events in the family Chevrolet, and whether I won or lost, played brilliantly or just survived, it didn’t matter to her. Her enthusiasm was unwavering. Pap, on the other hand, seldom saw these early matches because he couldn’t get away from the course, though he never missed any of the action if the match was played at Latrobe. And if I came home and boasted of thrashing another kid, he would typically nod and remind me with a sobering note of skepticism not to get too cocky and to keep practicing if I knew what was good for me. The implication was, there was always going to be somebody tougher waiting out there to clean my clock and I’d better be prepared. I must admit, I really burned inside to earn a simple compliment from my father. After all, by that age I could routinely get around Latrobe in even par and was already regularly beating the boys on the high school golf team. But that compliment never came, which probably explains why I tried all the harder to please him.

  I’m not entirely certain, but I believe that was the summer Babe Didrikson Zaharias came to Latrobe and put on an exhibition match, playing with Pap, me, and a promising young golfer named Pat Harrison, whose daughter is LPGA star Muffin Spencer-Devlin. The Babe was one of the great women of American golf, with sparkling wit and a swing as strong as garlic. I remember how she stepped to the first tee, pegged up her ball, and turned to the gallery and joked, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Hold on for a second while I loosen my girdle …” She proceeded to nail the ball a mile down the fairway with one of the sweetest and most compact swings you’ve ever seen. She made it look so easy.

  The crowd ate up her showmanship, and I think I became aware of my own budding desire to show off and please people in that manner. Babe had a flair for the spectacular and the talent and personality to pull it off. Though no one but me realized it then, so did I. Prior to that, the only people I aimed to please with my golf shots were my father and mother. I was always pestering Pap to come watch what I could do in hopes he would praise me, which of course he never really did. That simply wasn’t his style.

  But, watching Babe do her thing, it occurred to me how great it would be to make lots of people—complete strangers at that—ooh and aah over a golf shot. It’s impossible to say that’s when I realized I loved performing in front of galleries, because the truth is, only a handful of people had ever seen me play in competition up to that point. But something in me was clearly drawn to the kind of public admiration I witnessed that day Babe Didrikson Zaharias came to Latrobe.

  I already knew all the names of the game’s greatest stars. But probably the first Tour professional I met about that time was Lew Worsham, older brother of a young man who would soon change my life. At that time Lew was the head professional at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh. The Tour’s season was so short in those days, players invariably kept head professional jobs at clubs. Worsham would capture the U.S. Open in 1947 over Sam Snead in a playoff that was as exciting as any in Open history.

  A professional I knew even better and someone who had an even greater influence on me in those days, however, was a guy named Steve Kovach, an unpolished Pittsburgh steel-worker who could simply do magical things with a golf club in his hands. When Byron Nelson saw Steve play at the Canterbury Open in 1946, he commented that Kovach was as good as anybody he’d ever seen. That was no small compliment, and Kovach did have incredible shotmaking skills. I knew this because as a schoolboy golfer I got to play with Steve
a great deal around Pittsburgh. He could produce high floating shots that would settle as sweetly as anything you’d ever seen, and I recall how at Ligonier, where the greens were small and the mounds so fierce, he could bounce balls off those slopes like nobody else.

  I learned a lot from watching Steve play golf. But I also learned a lot from watching what happened to Steve Kovach as the result of his success. Kovach, as I say, was an unpolished gem, a blue-collar worker whose grasp of proper English was marginal at best. People would snicker when Steve spoke, and reporters made fun of the way he butchered the language while attempting to explain his magical shots. Some well-meaning people got together and paid for Steve to attend language school in Cincinnati. The strategy, however, backfired and only compounded the problem. Steve emerged from these tutorials using—and misusing—big words he scarcely knew the meaning of. The laughter only intensified, and Steve eventually suffered a mental breakdown and wound up in an institution, out of golf. It was a genuinely sad story, and one that I took to heart. My father had drilled into me the importance of knowing who you are and being true to that, not putting up appearances or trying to be something you simply aren’t and can never be.

  But I also drew another lesson from Steve’s ordeal—the importance of learning to speak well. I came to understand how the words you say can make or break any situation.

  Admittedly, I wasn’t the best student in high school. I made decent marks in math because it had a useful purpose on the golf course (keeping score and tallying up bets), and pretty ordinary ones in English and history. Socially, as difficult as it may be for some people to believe, I was almost painfully shy, at least early on where girls were concerned. Thanks to Cheech, I went out with a number of pretty girls from the Latrobe area, but the idea of having a “serious” girlfriend didn’t enter my mind.

  I guess at that time I was much more comfortable beating my buddies on the golf course or playing football and baseball with them. Those two sports were the reigning kings around Latrobe, and, despite my relatively small size, I earned letters playing halfback and defensive tackle in junior high school. I went out for the football team my freshman year at Latrobe High only to be told by the coach, Bill Yates, that the team didn’t have a uniform for me. This really stung. I was so upset I went home and told Pap, who, instead of being sympathetic, really chewed me out. “Boy,” he said, “you shouldn’t be playing football anyway. If you really want to play golf, stick to that!”

  Ironically, I grew a lot physically over the next year, and by the time my sophomore year rolled around, Yates, who was also the school golf coach, almost begged me to come out for football. By then it was too late, though. Ken Bowman played on both teams, but I had no interest in playing anything but golf.

  My first high school match was against a kid named Bill Danko, now a retired radiologist in Los Angeles whom I still see from time to time. Bill was from Jeanette High School, a powerful lefty, really a very good player and a heck of a nice guy. I was nervous as hell the first time we played, but I shot 71 and somehow beat him. We played two matches a year for the next four years, and Bill got close many times but never managed to beat me. He remains a good sport about it.

  I was progressing fairly rapidly now. My first West Penn Amateur came at fifteen—I finished second and was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t win. Lew Worsham wasn’t the only golfer to have a great year in 1946. That was my junior year at Latrobe, when things really began to take off for me. First I won the West Penn Junior title and, later that fall, with Ken Bowman as a caddie, the PIAA, or state high school championship, on one of the fine old courses at Penn State. We hitched a ride to State College, I remember, with the tennis team because my usual ride to tournaments, my mother, was home with a new baby, my brother, Jerry.

  Something important happened in the final match at Penn State that, in retrospect, would become another so-called signature of my game—though it was hardly a conscious thing at the time. Somewhere near the end of the match, holding a slight lead, I found my ball in the heavy rough with only a narrow gap through the trees to the green. An errant shot like that was fairly typical—I had them all the time at Latrobe—the result of my aggressively strong swing. The smart play was to pitch the ball back to the fairway. The truth is, though, that thought never really entered my head. There was no way I was not going for broke at that green, because I knew I could pull off that shot. I selected a 5-iron and fired my ball through the trees, right up onto the green. For the first time, there was a little gallery following me, and I remember how enthusiastically they cheered over that shot. Their response genuinely surprised me. They loved it … and so did I. For years I’d been motivated to hit spectacular shots principally in order to please my father; now, like Babe Zaharias, I had it within my grasp to please people I didn’t even know with my golfing skills! What a thrill!

  Something else happened that summer that would have a lasting impact on how I approached and played the game. Both my parents were on hand to watch my match in the West Penn Junior finals. Frustrated at having missed a short putt, I turned and threw my putter in disgust over the gallery and some small trees. My elation at winning quickly vanished when I was greeted with dead stone silence in the family car. “If you ever throw a club like that again,” my father told me, barely restraining his fury, “you’ll never play in another golf tournament.”

  I remember what a long ride back to Latrobe it was. Thank God my mother was there, slipping me affectionate quiet glances to let me know how proud she was of me. I know my father was brimming with pride as well, but I’d violated one of his cardinal rules about life and golf—that learning to be a gracious loser is at least as important as being a gracious winner. Being an ungracious winner was perhaps the worst thing he could imagine.

  I was enough like my mother, I guess, that I was incapable of hiding my emotions at either winning or losing. But thanks to Pap, I learned the value of never publicly displaying my frustration—frustration every golfer experiences—and keeping my emotions in the bottle when I lost, regardless of the depth of the disappointment, of which there would be plenty. More to the point, I never threw a club like that in anger again. At least not when my father was anywhere around to see it.

  I also played for the first time that summer in the Hearst juniors at Oakland Hills in Detroit. Al Watrous, whom Bob Jones once beat to capture the British Open at Lytham, was the head professional there, and I was pretty excited about meeting him. Unfortunately, it turned out that Watrous was coaching a player named Mac Hunter, my opponent in the finals, whose father, Willie, was head professional at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. I suppose you could call it healthy home-field advantage. In any event, it wasn’t my time to win and Hunter beat me by a significant margin. I vowed I would go back the next year an improved player and take the Hearst title from him.

  Something else happened at Detroit, though, that would have far greater impact on my career and life than winning the tournament, which, by the way, I never managed to do. It was there I met Buddy Worsham, the younger brother of Lew, soon to be the new National Open champion. His family called him “Bubby,” a nickname that didn’t suit him, in my mind. I called him “Bud” from day one—it simply seemed to suit him better. Bud and I were the same age and loved to horse around. We liked the same kinds of foods and the same kinds of girls (we were both painfully shy, but he was even shyer than me, if that was possible), and our rambunctious boyish personalities meshed wonderfully even if our golf games were distinctly different. For one thing, Bud had severed a tendon in his leg as a child and walked with a noticeable limp. Amazingly, he taught himself to stand on one leg and hit a golf ball, a feat that always astounded me because he could hit it a mile that way. Both of us hailed from golf families and wanted to be professionals ourselves.

  I did make it back to the Hearst National Junior Championship the next year, the summer of 1947. It was conducted at the now-defunct California Country Club in Los Angeles. Bud Worsham
and I rode the train west together, and perhaps the long two-day train ride exhausted me, or maybe I simply wanted—or expected—to capture that Hearst title too much. In any case, I was eliminated in the first round.

  This hurt, because my golf game seemed to be at the top of its form. That year I would win both the West Penn Junior and West Penn Amateur titles (the first of my five WPA titles), capture my second straight Pennsylvania schoolboy championship held at Penn State, win a host of smaller invitational tournaments, and even make the semifinals of the Pennsylvania Amateur Championship.

  But the whole way west to California on the train, Bud Worsham talked up a storm about where he was going to college. Some place down south called Wake Forest. Down there, Bud said, you could play golf all winter long and never have to interrupt your game for cold weather. That sounded great to me, almost too good to be true. The winters in Latrobe, as I’ve admitted, sometimes really got me down. Maybe at least as impressive to me, Bud had been offered a full athletic scholarship to play golf at Wake Forest—full tuition, room and board, the whole nine yards.

  The truth was, I hadn’t really given a whole lot of thought to going to college. Part of me, I suppose, thought I might join the U.S. Army to get my military service out of the way—World War II was over, but the draft was still in business—then come out and turn professional and try my luck at tournament golf. Thanks to my handsome schoolboy press clippings in Pennsylvania, Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh had expressed some interest in me, both of which offered full-tuition scholarships but not one penny of room and board.

  My family wasn’t in the kind of financial position to pay for my feeding and housing elsewhere. Pap and I had talked about college and pretty much decided that if I couldn’t find a full ride like the one Bud had received from Wake Forest College, wherever it was, then I’d stay put at home, work at the club to make money, and maybe attend classes at St. Vincent College in Latrobe to try to earn a business degree.