A Golfer's Life Page 7

  On the other hand, I was somewhat bitter that I’d missed another golden opportunity. But as Pap had trained me to do, I put on a good face and was a perfect gentleman about the loss, smiling and graciously congratulating Stranny and wishing him the best of luck. I really meant it—he deserved to win and dearly wanted the National Amateur title for himself and his family. Inside, however, I was seething mad at myself for having blown my chance to capture the prize I wanted more than anything else at that time in golf.

  A great deal of emotion and high expectation surrounded Wake’s homecoming football game of 1950. We were playing Carolina on our turf, and Carolina was the dominant pigskin power in the conference at that time. Wake, as I recall, had merely a so-so year. But with all those Baptists at home in the stands praying for an upset, it stood to reason that something big just might happen. Incidentally, the story that Peahead Walker had attempted to recruit me for the football team is true. Like Frank Stranahan, I was physically stronger than most golfers and pretty agile. I loved watching and playing football, but by that point had accepted Pap’s belief that it was foolish to play a game in which I could easily be injured and jeopardize my golf career.

  As usual, a group of us planned to attend the game together and maybe go out to dinner afterward or to the homecoming dance that night at a hotel in Durham. Bud threw us a little curve by announcing he planned to sell programs that afternoon to make some extra spending money but agreed to join us at halftime. True to his word, he showed up and we had our usual laughs, plus a few discreet bourbon and Cokes.

  I honestly can’t remember who won the game that day, because in my mind the game and the events afterward take on the quality of an eerie and troubling dream. We all went back to the Community Club, as the athletic dormitory was called in those days, and some of our friends either went on to dinner or slept to rest up for the evening festivities. I decided to take a nap and quickly dozed off on my bed, only to be shaken awake by Bud a short time later. He told me that he and Gene Scheer, Jim Flick’s roommate from next door, were going to get some dinner and go to the dance in Durham and he wanted me to join them. He was really keen on that idea and lobbied hard, I suppose mostly because I was always the one who was able to talk to pretty girls.

  I shook my head and sleepily told him I wasn’t interested in the dance, explaining that Jim and I had discussed going to a movie later.

  “Come on, Bud,” I said to him. “Stay with me. Go with us to the movie.”

  “No,” he said. “Gene and I are going to the dance.”

  So I fell back to sleep.

  Later, I did get up and Jim Flick and I went out to the movie and were back at the dorm before midnight. In the morning, I looked over and saw Bud’s bed hadn’t been slept in, and this surprised me. It wasn’t like Bud Worsham to stay out all night—at least not without me along to take care of him.

  Surprise gave way to worry and worry turned to panic when I went next door to see if Gene had come home. Gene hadn’t reached his bed either. I remember several of the guys were in Jim and Gene’s room, shooting the breeze about the game and the dance, and I remember telling them to let me know if anybody heard from Bud or Gene. Then I went back to my room to wait.

  About an hour later, Jim Flick appeared at my door and said Coach Johnston wanted to talk to me. The instant I saw Jim’s face I knew something terrible had happened. “Arn,” Johnny told me somberly, “we’ve got a problem. We think maybe Bud’s had an accident.”

  Within minutes, we were all in Johnny’s car headed toward Durham, and it was while we were riding in the car that Johnny broke the news to me that he thought Bud and Gene were dead. I remember how incomprehensible that sounded, but a little while later, crossing a narrow bridge over a rocky creek, we passed the site where their Buick had run off the road, skidded briefly along a support rail, then landed upside down in the rocky streambed, crushing both boys to death.

  We drove to Durham in silence, searching for a funeral home where the authorities might have taken the bodies. We had a devil of a time finding the right one. Johnny’s brother was a highway patrolman, and it was through him, as I recall, that we finally learned Bud and Gene had been taken to Raleigh.

  “Who are you, family?” the funeral director asked me.

  I told him I was Bud’s best friend.

  “Would you be prepared to identify the body?” he added.

  I didn’t know what to say. I was numb with disbelief. I suppose part of me did wish to view the body—if only to prove that the nightmare was real.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He led me into a room and there they were, both of them, lying together on a table. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

  For some reason, Johnny and I then went searching for the car, Bud’s car, the car in which we’d had so many good times. Perhaps the shock was so great we needed to see the physical evidence of this unimaginable nightmare. Or perhaps I wanted some other mental image to replace the one I’d just seen—twisted metal in place of those broken bodies. We found the car a little while later at an auto junkyard just outside of town, crushed almost beyond recognition. But it was unmistakably the Buick. Essentially, the vehicle had been torn in half.

  Johnny took me back to the dorm at Wake. That was the last place I wanted to go, to tell the truth, but I couldn’t imagine where else to go except home—and home was over four hundred miles away. I called my parents, and their shock and grief almost matched mine.

  Jim Flick moved his things into my room that night, and I remember that we sat up late talking about what had happened, what we would do, and I don’t know what else. Perhaps this was good for us both, a necessary venting of grief and anger. Grief is one of the most powerful forces on earth, and almost always unpredictable. I’d never felt anything like the emotions and conflicting feelings suddenly turning over inside me. I wanted to play golf, but staying at Wake Forest suddenly felt empty and pointless without Bud there. I didn’t want to go to war, but I suddenly no longer wanted to be in college. I wanted to run away, but I wanted to be comforted. I wanted to sleep, but I wanted to wake up from this nightmare. Jim must have felt the same confusion and loss of direction.

  It’s strange. Over the years Jim and I have remained friends, but more distantly than you might expect. I wouldn’t say we are terribly close even today. He’s gone on to have a distinguished career as one of the game’s premier teachers, including his long association with Jack Nicklaus, and I sometimes wonder if the shared intimate horror of Bud’s and Gene’s deaths and the subsequent soul-wrenching conversations we had in those long days and nights after the tragedy sealed our friendship in place, froze it in time—maybe prevented anything deeper from forming.

  Some things go beyond words, and I simply can’t say for sure. And, I’ll wager, Jim can’t either.

  Bob Jones, my first golf hero, once commented that he never learned anything from a golf tournament he won. It may sound absurd to compare the death of my best friend to losing a golf tournament, but I’ve learned life really does resemble a golf round in its crazy ups and downs. For better or worse, those moments of unaccountable loss or failure teach us the most about who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we may be headed.

  After Bud’s wrenching funeral in Maryland, I went home to Latrobe and told my parents I needed a break, some time away from college. I thought I might enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard, because the guard required only a three-year service commitment, unlike the U.S. Navy or Air Force. My father, I could tell, wasn’t pleased to hear this news. He was unshakable in his belief that I should finish my studies and earn a degree, perhaps rightly fearing that if I got out of the service and started earning a buck I would probably never go back and finish what I’d started. On the other hand, perhaps either out of respect for Bud or simply because of the ordeal I’d just been through, he made no comment one way or the other. But he did say the final call was mine to make because I’d have to live with it. Both my parents, I be
lieve, were still in a state of shock. They’d loved Bud like a son, and I think they were also deeply relieved I was still alive.

  My mother had an almost infallible instinct for knowing how I felt about almost anything, whether it was for golf or for people. And I think that, unlike my father, she understood the depth of the grief I was reeling from. Pap was a great believer in the curative powers of working hard and doing your job, toughing out any misfortune, but Mother was a natural sympathizer and I think she fully understood that my whole world had been turned upside down. Some kinds of grief require additional airing, perhaps a new landscape for better perspective, in order for the healing to begin.

  She told me to follow my heart on this one, in effect to live my life the same way I played the game, my own way.

  The simple truth is, I was haunted by a feeling I couldn’t escape, that if I’d only gone that night to Durham with Bud and Gene things might have turned out very differently. I’d probably have been driving the Buick, and we would have all returned safely from Durham and gone to bed and gotten up that Sunday morning and maybe gone out and played golf and the world would have been exactly as it had always been for us, spinning happily on its axis.

  But that was now all gone. Wake without Bud was unthinkable. He was the reason I’d gone there in the first place, the reason I’d stayed, the reason I’d become one of the best college golfers in America.

  I did return, briefly, after Christmas, to finish out the term and be alone with my thoughts. Though I never broke down publicly, I shed plenty of tears in private. My last days there were a quiet torture for me.

  One day in mid-January I picked up the phone and called the United States Coast Guard recruiting office in Washington, D.C. A couple of days later, I was on a bus headed north, hoping to outrun a grief I still feel like a cool evening shadow almost fifty years later.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Turning Point

  By the time I arrived at the U.S. Coast Guard’s basictraining facility the third week of January 1951, the coldest, bleakest part of the winter had set in at Cape May, New Jersey, at the southern tip of the state where the Atlantic Ocean joins Delaware Bay.

  I’ve seen it written that during at least the first two of my three years of Coast Guard service, due to Bud’s death, I lost interest in playing golf, but that’s simply not true. My passion for playing the game was probably as intense as it ever was. In fact, golf was the foundation of my life. Because everything else in my life had been shaken up in the aftermath of Bud’s accident, golf was a refuge for me. Out on the course, things still made sense. It was the one place where I felt in control of what was happening to me. The reason I didn’t play much in the Coast Guard is simply that I had little or no access to golf courses—a situation that dramatically improved by my third year in the service.

  A true little-known irony, however, is that this same passion for golf nearly prevented me from being accepted by the Coast Guard. The reason was flatfeet. After signing up in Washington and being sent for routine physical exams, I was informed that—a big surprise to me—I’d ruined my arches by running barefoot on the golf course so much many years before. I was put through a battery of additional physical tests to see if I could meet the physical requirements, made to run sprints, walk on my toes, all sorts of things I never imagined having to do to qualify for service.

  That was tough, but I passed their tests and life soon got tougher. I was shipped to boot camp at Cape May, where my company commander was rumored to have been kicked out of the U.S. Marines because he was too rough on the men in his command. That may have been something they told every green recruit—especially college boys who played golf—but after I got to know him I had every reason to believe the rumor was correct. He was one tough SOB, and I tried my best to do what was expected of me and stay on his good side.

  The Coast Guard receives less publicity than the other three major branches of military service, but the fact is that during the years of the Korean War—which was raging full blast at that point in time—the guard lost a higher percentage of its people in the conflict than any of the other branches of service. Its skill in escorting ships and troops as well as its legendary search-and-rescue expertise were about to be depicted, as it turned out, in a new movie, aptly called Fighting Coast Guard, starring Brian Donlevy. Just as I was finishing up my boot camp training, word came down from on high that an honor guard detail of twenty Coast Guard cadets would be selected to attend the movie’s world premiere in Washington. Being the enterprising fellow I was, I decided that making the detail would give me an opportunity to go see my sister Cheech and her new husband, Ron, who lived just across the Potomac in Alexandria. I also hoped to get some welcome R and R and maybe play a little bit of golf while I was at it.

  Clever me—almost too clever, as it turned out. I wasn’t the only guy scheming for a break. Over four hundred men volunteered for the detail, and weeks of hard drilling and ruthless marching ensued. Every few days, names would be dropped from the list for the slightest infraction or breach of discipline. One mistake and you were out. The list quickly dropped to 300 names and then 200 names, and my name was still on it. It went from 200 to 100 prospects, and I was still there, getting more confident every day. In retrospect, it was a little bit like trying to make the cut of a major golf tournament, and I was really pleased with myself when I made the top fifty. Finally, after two months of exhaustive training and nerve-racking worry, the names of the twenty lucky cadets who would be going to the movie premiere in Washington were posted … and Arnold Daniel Palmer’s name was on the list! I could have jumped over the moon.

  They put us in our best dress whites and sent us south to Washington on a bus. That evening, when President Truman and Brian Donlevy and all the other celebrities arrived at the theater, the honor guard was in place and the flashbulbs were popping. After a few words from dignitaries and so forth, everyone trooped inside to see the movie, and the honor guard was left standing out front. We stood there for another hour before being ordered back onto the bus and taken to a cheap hotel. The next morning before sunrise, we were informed there was no leave and we were being sent straight back to Cape May.

  So much for a family reunion and my brief golf vacation plans.

  A few days later, though, I was called into my commander’s office and asked if I would accept “permanent party” status. That meant the brass wanted me to stick around Cape May and train recruits. Someone else got the bright idea that since I was a hotshot college golfer, perhaps I might agree to build a nine-hole golf course on the base. I enthusiastically agreed to do the job and was summarily handed a rake and a shovel, placed in charge of an elderly hand-push mower, and directed to a weed-choked grassy patch of ground located between the base’s air runways.

  Of the 250 or so golf courses I’ve designed and built over the past fifty years, that first one was probably not the most challenging layout but certainly was the most physically exhausting to create. In addition to the fact that it was suddenly summer and surprisingly hot on the Jersey shore, I essentially had to do most of the shaping and grooming and mowing myself. When I was done, it was a pretty rudimentary layout—a nine-hole chip and putt, really—but I was pleased with my efforts, and the officers who played it were delighted to have a place to hit balls. For a while, a small eternity it seemed to me, that was about as close as I got to a golf course. Then I finally got a coveted weekend leave and was able to play a private course in Wildwood, New Jersey, discovering to my dismay that my game had more than a few barnacles on it.

  In the Coast Guard there is seldom rest for the weary. On top of my course-building duty, I often had lifeguard duty at the base beach, sinking barrels for buoys or watching recruits swim in our restricted area next to the public beach. One afternoon I saw a couple of young recruits in trouble, maybe 150 yards offshore, and was off the lifeguard stand like a shot. I was a good swimmer, but realized as I swam out that I was clearly no match for a couple of guys drowning. L
uckily, two girls from the public beach saw what was happening and swam out to lend a hand, and we somehow managed to haul them to shore. Safe on land, I realized my heart was pounding wildly, as much out of fear as fatigue. We could have all been in big trouble, they for idiotically straying where they shouldn’t have been, I for letting them do it.

  As I think back on it, it seems to me that I was always on the verge of being in trouble with my superiors. For one thing, it was obvious to anybody who knew me that I was simply fulfilling my military obligation and itching to get back to the world of playing golf. For another, the workload and constant discipline didn’t appear to faze me as much as it did some of the other young guys. Thanks to Pap, hard work and being chewed out for something were fairly routine for me, and I think the ease with which I went about my days irritated a particular lieutenant who used almost any excuse to pick on me. I think he knew I was a college-boy golfer, and that didn’t sit well with him. At any rate, he was always looking for an excuse to try to bust my chops.

  One day in the base gymnasium I nearly gave him that excuse. Because of the strength in my hands and upper body, I taught preliminary jujitsu to the recruits. It was nothing fancy, just some basic simple escape maneuvers. Typically, a hundred or so men would line up and run at me one at a time, and I would show them a simple break-and-fall technique. Well, proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, one guy came at me and decided to throw in an extra move—I tossed him on his back and broke his arm.

  I got a captain’s call for that and was sure I was in big trouble.