A Golfer's Life Read online

  “Mr. Palmer,” the captain began, looking somberly at me, “we’ve made a decision to transfer you …”

  Now I was really scared.

  “… and I’m going to give you an opportunity to go anywhere you wish to go.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. After a moment, I told the captain I’d like to go either to Washington, D.C., or Cleveland, Ohio, if it was okay with him. Both were fairly close to home, I reasoned, and both places had plenty of golf courses nearby.

  A few days later, I was sent to the 9th Coast Guard District Headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio.

  During those long and tough nine months at Cape May, I had played golf only a handful of times—at a private course in Wildwood, New Jersey, and once or twice back home in Latrobe during three- or five-day leaves.

  Though I managed to successfully defend my West Penn Amateur title and won a memorial invitational held that summer in Bud Worsham’s honor, the lack of practice took a large toll on the quality of my game, and my father was none too pleased when I signed up to play in the Greensburg Invitational. The tournament was held a few miles down the road from Latrobe, and I’d won it three times in its first four years. The trip home sort of set the tone for the dismal weekend. I was wearing my uniform and hitch-hiking with my gear and my golf bag when a guy pulled over in a Cadillac. He asked me to drive. With pleasant memories of George Fazio and our amusing ride south in mind, I happily got behind the wheel. We hadn’t gotten two miles down the road when this character suddenly reached over and placed his hand on my leg. “Pal,” I said to him, “you see this uniform? We’ve almost killed a couple guys who did what you’re doing.” I told him to get his hand the hell off me and if he didn’t I was going to ram his Cadillac into an embankment. At the next exit, I pulled over and got out, disgusted and spitting mad. When I got to Latrobe that night, still shaken, things didn’t get any better. Pap told me he thought I was pushing myself and had no business trying to play in the tournament the next day.

  I played anyway—if you want to call it playing. I got beaten badly, and Pap really let loose, chewing me out good for attempting to play when I was so unprepared. As usual, he was right. My game was so rusty, I should have skipped the tournament and just practiced at Latrobe. But I was hungry for tournament play and foolish enough to think I could actually win.

  On the plus side, reassignment to Cleveland held the prospect of more time to play golf because, as I was pleased to learn, Admiral Rainey, the district commanding officer, was a golf enthusiast. By another stroke of luck, I was assigned to the Coast Guard Auxiliary, a civilian outfit that would allow me more contact with the public and, ostensibly, a little more operating room where my free time was concerned. Thanks to amateur golf I had a number of friendly contacts in the metropolitan Cleveland area, and within a short time following my arrival a couple of gentlemen named Art Brooks and Laurie Purola would even offer me a membership in their club, Pine Ridge Country Club.

  I’d barely settled into my new job in Cleveland when I was summoned to the admiral’s office. I wondered what I’d done this time and was surprised when the admiral informed me he was interested in recommending me for Officers’ Candidate School. He thought he was doing me a big favor. In fact, it would mean two more years of service would be tacked onto my tour of duty, which was about the last thing I wanted.

  I did some pretty smooth talking. I thanked him for considering me to be officer material but explained that all I really wanted to do was get out of the service and play tournament golf in some form or another—as an amateur or maybe eventually as a touring professional. Under NCAA rules I still had some college eligibility left, and the idea of returning to Wake Forest to finish my degree and play golf also had some new appeal. All in all, he was very decent about it. He said he would instead send me off to Yeoman Storekeeping School in Groton, Connecticut, and then bring me back to my job in Cleveland. He also mentioned the idea of building a base driving range and maybe giving him a few swing pointers. I was relieved about not being headed to OCS and was pleased to do both chores for the admiral.

  My game may have been on hiatus in late 1952, but the golf world at large was hardly mourning my absence. My old Tar Heel opponent Harvie Ward would win the British Amateur that summer and the next year nearly take possession of a Masters green jacket as an amateur—proving conclusively that he was the best college golfer at that moment. Billy Maxwell and Don January were leading North Texas State to a third NCAA championship, and Gene Littler was about to leave San Diego State, but not before capturing the National Amateur and the San Diego Open the next year. Similarly, Ken Venturi, a junior at San Jose State, would soon make his presence known to the golfing world.

  On the professional scene, Ben Hogan was now almost more legend than man, but he still ruled golf like an icy monarch determined not to give up the throne. Two years after his miraculous recovery from a car crash, Hogan brought mighty Oakland Hills to its knees to win his third Open championship. In 1952 he was anxious to give his weary legs a rest, and as a consequence played mostly exhibition rounds and entered only three tournaments: the Masters, where he finished seventh, the Colonial, which he won, and the Open, a third-place finish. Curiously, that Open was won by a burly, placid, thirty-two-year-old ex-accountant from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who’d been a professional only two years. Julius Boros had great tempo and a beautiful, languid swing, but Hogan, the most methodical attacker of golf courses of his era, would come back the very next year to have the greatest year of his competitive life—playing six seventy-two-hole tournaments and winning five, including wins at the Colonial, the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open, a feat some compared to those of Jones in his prime. If Ben Hogan’s career had a peak, that was it.

  Other greats were fading, though. Byron Nelson, another of my boyhood heroes, had effectively been in retirement at his ranch since 1946, and even the ageless Sam Snead’s game was losing some of its youthful zest. Tommy Bolt and Porky Oliver were still hanging around, factors in almost every tournament they played, but a new generation of players was coming along, symbolized by the emergence of a tall, lean southerner named Cary Middlecoff, who won the 1949 U.S. Open and, like Nelson, was a long and extraordinary driver of the ball. Mike Souchak, my old Duke nemesis, would also turn pro in 1952 and eventually win sixteen Tour events, and there was a host of other promising young players waiting in the wings to challenge the game’s old guard, including Gardner Dickinson, Peter Thomson, Paul Harney, Bob Rosburg, Dow Finsterwald, and soon, Littler and Venturi.

  As I say, at that moment I was still on the sidelines, so to speak, champing at the bit to get back into the game. Thanks to an understanding admiral and the friendship of Brooks and Purola, who arranged a place for me to play regularly, I was able to start playing golf and practicing a lot—almost every weekend, as it evolved, starting early Friday afternoon and ending late Sunday afternoon. They introduced me to a host of the city’s golfers, some skilled players as well as your typical weekend golf addicts, and before too long I was supplementing my modest Coast Guard salary by as much as $100 off two-dollar nassaus, having more fun playing the game than I’d had in years. I even started going out with a young woman who was modeling around Cleveland, though admittedly my attention to her was a distant second to that in my revived golf life.

  One of the businessmen I was introduced to was Bill Wehnes, a paint manufacturer’s rep who sold industrial paints and tapping compound, a substance used to cool metal when holes are being drilled through it. Bill was a member of Canterbury Country Club and a pretty cool customer himself. He and his wife, April, more or less adopted me as their surrogate son. Bill knew I worried a great deal about money and the dilemma I would soon face—how to support myself and make the kind of commitment I yearned to make to playing tournament golf—and he proposed a nifty solution. Upon completion of my obligation to the Coast Guard, now just slightly over six months away, he would pay me to go back to Wake Forest and finish up my b
usiness degree, then hire me to work as a paint rep for him in the Cleveland area, allowing me as much time as I needed to polish my game and compete in tournaments. It was an offer that was too good to turn down, so I accepted it.

  The summer of 1953 was a good one for me on and off the golf course. I won the Ohio Amateur at Pine Ridge and another Greensburg Invitational. I won the Cleveland Amateur, sponsored by the Plain Dealer, and an open tournament where a number of the top touring professionals like Porky Oliver and Jimmy Demaret competed. After a two-year absence from the event, I went to Oklahoma City and made it all the way to the fourth round of the U.S. Amateur before being nipped at the wire, beaten one-up by a pleasant Ohioan named Don Albert. A short while later, my first effort to make the cut at the U.S. Open came up a couple of strokes shy.

  I was disappointed but not discouraged. The confidence I felt in my game was almost frightening, and the rekindled desire to play was practically all-consuming. When winter came and the private clubs around Cleveland closed down, several of us routinely went down to Lake Shore golf course and beat balls at frozen cups. Golf nuts in woolies.

  Suddenly, it was late January and I was out of the service. My time with the Coast Guard was finished. I made a bee-line to Wake Forest, where my scholarship had been reactivated, and arrived a few days after the spring semester had begun. People there couldn’t have been nicer, and because Johnny Johnston was now occupying Jim Weaver’s job—Weaver had gone on to become commissioner of the new Atlantic Coast Conference—I was named interim golf coach. The team played pretty well that spring and I played exceptionally, winning the ACC championship and a number of other smaller invitationals and pro-ams, setting the stage for bigger wins.

  In retrospect I was probably playing too much golf, because, once again, I ran afoul of the academic dean. One afternoon he summoned me to his office and pointed out that the scholarship that had been generously reactivated was in serious jeopardy because, just like old times, I was missing classes in the afternoons. It was true—I couldn’t deny any of his charges. Most afternoons, and many of the mornings, I played thirty-six holes and practiced my chipping and putting. The bookkeeping course I was supposed to be taking met for two hours two afternoons a week, but I reasoned that rather than sit there and fall asleep it was better for everybody if I did something useful with my time, like work on my short game. Unfortunately, the dean didn’t see it like that. After chewing me out, he warned me in no uncertain terms that I’d better start attending classes or I’d be in big trouble—and back on the bricks.

  I think I did make it to a few afternoon sessions of bookkeeping after that, but it turned out to be almost immaterial, because by the end of the semester I found I was still a few hours short of having earned my degree. That was too bad; I really did want that business degree in my pocket, and part of me regrets to this day not finishing my task at Wake.

  But summer had come and tournament golf beckoned, and better yet, thanks to Bill Wehnes, I suddenly had a job that complemented my ambitions to compete on a higher level of the game. I knew nothing about selling paint, but I liked people and could talk to almost anybody, and very quickly a kind of wonderful routine established itself: Every weekday morning I’d get up and shower and go out and make calls on prospective clients, then meet Bill for lunch at Canterbury. In the afternoon, we’d play golf. Weekends were taken up entirely with the game, almost sunrise to sunset.

  It was through these expanding golf connections that I met John Roberts, a successful manufacturing executive from Columbus, Ohio, who loved golf, served for a time on a USGA committee, and befriended me at a critical moment in a way that nearly altered the direction of my career and life. Here’s what happened:

  John had a friend at another Cleveland manufacturing firm who had invented a golf course maintenance vehicle they believed would have immediate appeal to course superintendents everywhere. The vehicle was a nimble trailer-like device equipped with a special hydraulic lift that would permit a superintendent to move mowing equipment from one point to another point on the golf course much more quickly than the conventional manner of driving it, thereby saving time and money. It was a clever idea, the kind of machinery you see at every course these days, and it was the clincher.

  John and his partner offered to pay me a flat salary of $50,000 a year plus expenses to play the PGA Tour as an amateur while representing them. The idea was that I’d go, say, to the Tour site in Phoenix (we talked about that being my first stop) and try to qualify for a spot in the field, then make a pitch to the course superintendent. As enticing schemes go, this one appeared to have no downside whatsoever. I’d get to play tournament golf without worrying about my income, while selling this practical piece of machinery to a sympathetic buyer.

  I told Bill Wehnes about the deal, and he was nearly heartbroken. He urged me to stick with him and even offered to double my salary, which still wouldn’t have come close to the fifty grand. We both knew it was a deal too good to refuse, and he reluctantly gave me his blessing. I called Pap to tell him about the deal, and he admitted it sounded pretty good. Pap still wasn’t convinced golf was much of a paying proposition, but the fifty grand got his respect.

  I’ll never forget the morning I went to see John’s business partner at Warner Swazey, the manufacturing firm where he was plant manager, to finalize the deal. I got there early, only to be told I’d have to wait because my future employer wasn’t back yet from Florida. It seems he flew south every weekend to be with his wife and children.

  I sat for a small eternity in that office waiting room, trying to keep my anxiousness to get going at bay. Finally, the man’s secretary came out and apologized, saying her boss wouldn’t be in that day. Something had come up in Florida and someone, she said, would contact me later. I remember leaving that waiting room really disappointed and a bit worried that the deal might somehow fall through.

  The deal did fall through, because my prospective boss had been killed that weekend in a car crash. I felt deeply sorry for his family, but I also felt sorry for me. I’d been that close to having a financial angel and the kind of dough that would have allowed me to keep my amateur status but ease my way onto the Tour without having to scrape by and live out of the trunk of a car as so many pros did. When I called my father to break the news, he said, “Well, Arn. It’s probably for the best. You’ve got a good job with Wehnes. You stick to that and do a good job and keep playing golf.” It was so typical of him. Nothing in life came easy, in Pap’s view, and not everything that glittered was gold.

  Bill Wehnes was a perfect gentleman about the whole thing, sympathetic even, and more than happy to let me continue in my repping job for him. But that wasn’t the end of the prospective deals. A few days later, another acquaintance from the course called me to his office and said he and a group of fellows would stake me to $10,000 to play the Tour for a year, but the catch was a big one: they wanted the first ten grand I won back and fifty percent of everything else I won after that. The deal was absurd. I was sorely tempted to tell the guy to shove it. Instead, I got up, politely shook his hand and thanked him, then stormed quietly out of his office, wondering what I was going to do next.

  There are moments in life when you feel the deck is stacked against you. I felt that way when Buddy Worsham died, and I felt that way when my golden sponsorship deal fell through. I was twenty-five years old and owned nothing more valuable than my golf clubs. Money, or lack of money, was always what kept good players from taking a stab at the vagabond life of a touring professional. Sponsorships weren’t nearly as commonplace or as lucrative as today, and the byways were littered with scores of topflight amateurs who, burdened by families or other financial responsibilities, either took a halfhearted leap and failed or never quite worked up the means or the nerve to try to become the next Snead, Hogan, or Nelson. I knew I had the nerve, possibly the ability, and for one giddy moment I’d even had the means to be the next Hogan. But now my guy was gone and, it seemed, so was my one best
shot at a professional golf career.

  I knew what my father would have told me. He would have said to pick up my head and quit complaining and get back to work. So I did that—in more ways than one.

  A great deal has been written about my sixty-one tour victories, seven major championships, and various comebacks and charges. But none of it could have happened without things falling into place the way they did, the sequence of events that took place over the next few weeks at the end of the summer of 1954. In many respects, this was the turning point of my life.

  First I drove to Chicago’s Tam O’Shanter Country Club for George S. May’s extravagant two-week golf shindig, which consisted of two back-to-back tournaments—the All American Open and the World Championship of Golf. I was low amateur in the All American, tying for fourteenth in the field, nine strokes ahead of Frank Stranahan. May upped the purse for the World Championship, his crown jewel, to the unheard-of amount of $100,000. The winner that year, Bob Toski, took home $50,000 in cold, hard cash, and was guaranteed an additional $50,000 in the form of fifty confirmed $1,000 exhibition matches. In comparison, an average Tour purse that year was less than $20,000.

  In many respects, George S. May was the P. T. Barnum of American golf, a short, stocky, flamboyant former Bible salesman with a well-fed stomach who favored outlandish costumes and was whispered to have had as many pals in the mob as he did in Chicago politics. Someone once commented that May took a game that evolved from humble Scottish peasants and gave it back to them. There was no question he considered golf more of a popular entertainment than a serious game, because between 1941 and 1957 the controversial promoter established the richest purses on the Tour (more than $2 million in prize money), brought television coverage to the course for the first time, and was believed to be the first to identify players for the convenience of the spectators, many of whom had never been anywhere near a golf course.