A Golfer's Life Read online

  I remember hearing what a character George May was long before I ever set eyes on him. Say what you will about him, the man had a flair for promoting golf. Among his innovations, he publicized his events in full-page newspaper ads, was the first to pay hefty appearance fees to top professionals, and was the first to erect spectator bleacher seats beside greens. Among his less dignified antics, he employed clowns and a “masked marvel” golfer to roam the premises and entertain the paying customers, and he gave away hefty door prizes that had nothing to do with golf. His galleries were massive, unschooled in the gentler courtesies of the game, and invariably rowdy. Some players, Ben Hogan for one, were offended by May’s antics, feeling with some justification that his commercial ploys demeaned the game. For example, at one point, to help fans identify the players better, he proposed having them wear numbers on their backs, as athletes do in team sporting events. You should have heard the intense outcry of protest from many players who thought such a stunt was far below their dignity. It was eventually decided that caddies would wear identifying numbers instead, and some time after that, the players’ names wound up on the caddies’ backs.

  May’s tournaments were one part sporting event, one part Roman spectacle, and, whatever else was true about him, his timing couldn’t have been better, because the advent of television was suddenly changing the social landscape of American life. This was, fittingly, the setting where Lew Worsham played one of the most exciting shots ever struck, holing a wedge approach for an eagle two on the final hole of the World Championship to beat Chandler Harper by one stroke. Worsham didn’t see the ball go in the hole, but millions of people who had never set foot on a golf course did, thanks to the fact that the moment was broadcast live on television. Some have speculated that the event did almost as much to popularize golf and the Tour as my own televised charges in the decade that followed. While I prefer to think my athleticism and personality were helpful in attracting a new generation of Americans to the game, there’s undoubtedly truth in that assertion.

  The same year that I played in the All American and the World Championship, Sam Snead had edged out Ben Hogan in an eighteen-hole playoff at the Masters, and the debate simmered over who was really the best player in the game at the moment. May grandiosely offered to settle the issue once and for all by tacking an extra $25,000 on the purse for his World Championship; if either man won the championship he would collect no less than $75,000. But Hogan, disgusted as much by May’s antics as by his belief that the PGA Tour should be run by an executive committee instead of the players themselves, stayed home in Texas.

  The really interesting news that year was made on the amateur side. Stranahan won low-amateur honors at the World Championship by neatly reversing the outcome from a week before, edging me by a hole. I remember that as we were standing together at the presentation ceremony, Stranny turned to me and said, “You know, Arn, if I don’t win the Amateur next week, I’ve made up my mind to turn pro.” He’d won the British Amateur in 1948, but the U.S. Amateur had always somehow eluded him.

  “Muss, why would you want to do that?” I asked him. I was genuinely surprised. After all, even though purses like May’s gaudy windfalls were awful tempting to a working stiff like me, Frank had enough family money to play the game purely for the love of it for an eternity. I certainly would have, in his position.

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll see what happens in Detroit.”

  * * *

  The 54th United States Amateur Championship was to be held at the Country Club of Detroit, on a great old golf course recently refurbished by the renowned architect Robert Trent Jones. It was a layout I had never seen. To win the Amateur, it was necessary to play six straight eighteen-hole matches in just four days, then endure the thirty-six-hole semifinals and finals. It was match play all the way, and though 1953 champion Gene Littler wouldn’t be defending (he opted to turn pro instead), the field included the likes of Harvie Ward; Billy Joe Patton, the golf sensation of the year who almost won the Masters and was low amateur at the Open; Don Cherry, the reigning Canadian Amateur champ; public links champion Gene Andrews; the great Willie Turnesa (Amateur champion in 1938 and 1948, and 1947 British Amateur champion); Bill Campbell (Amateur champ in 1964, future president of the USGA, and captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews); and finally the man who’d won every major amateur event in the world save this one—Frank Stranahan.

  My first match, beginning at 8:06 on Monday, the twenty-third of August, was against Frank Strafaci, a seven-time winner of the New York Metropolitan title, and it was one of the closest matches I’d played all year. The highlight for me came at the difficult 460-yard par-4 17th, played as a par 5 by the club’s membership, when I decided to hit a 4-wood from a fairway trap. The sand shot failed to reach the putting surface, but my pitch was within five feet of the hole. I holed the putt to win after Strafaci took three to get down from the fringe. Frank’s total score for the round was 71, one more than my even-par total.

  An amusing footnote: I don’t remember if it was that evening or the evening before the start of the tournament, but in an effort to keep myself loose and in a relaxed frame of mind, I invited the model I’d been going out with in Cleveland to come over to Detroit for the week. Unfortunately, Bill Wehnes arrived almost simultaneously and lit into me as my own outraged father would have. “Get her out of here,” he snarled at me paternally. “You’re here to win the Amateur, and you’re not going to do it with her here.”

  He knew I would need every ounce of my concentration to make it through the ordeal dead ahead, and he was right. The model went packing.

  For my second match I drew a Florida State golfer named John Veghte, and thanks to a lot of bold long putts, I survived another close match to beat him one-up. My third match—against Richard Whiting, a former captain of the Notre Dame golf team—was also unexpectedly tough and required the full eighteen to determine the outcome in my favor, 2 and 1. Again, I attacked pins and putted boldly, though my teenage caddy cheekily informed the press afterward that I was fairly “erratic inside six feet.”

  Finally, on Wednesday, for my fourth-round match, I got a break from the USGA, or at least from the golf gods. Walter Andzel fell pretty quickly, 5 and 3, which allowed me to get off the course just as a savage thunderstorm broke, suspending play for almost an hour. The headline for the day, however, was written in the morning rounds when Stranny defeated Harvie Ward one-up in an eighteen-hole thriller that still had the gallery buzzing.

  Of course, he was my next opponent.

  Despite our friendship, I had plenty of reasons to fear Stranny. In previous match-play challenges his age and experience had dominated, most notably at the North and South, where he whipped me 11 and 10 in a thirty-six-hole semifinal, and at the 1950 Amateur, where he smoked me 4 and 3. This was Frank’s eleventh run at the National Amateur title, and I knew he would be tougher than a two-dollar steak.

  Fortunately, I played nearly perfectly from tee to green and was one under par for the front side, including a couple of deuces, leaving me two up at the turn. Stranny uncharacteristically sprayed his drives into the menacing rough on six of the first twelve holes. I, on the other hand, committed only a couple of costly mistakes—at the 14th, where I drove into the rough, and at 16, where I hit into a bunker. The wind had come up by then, I remember, blowing harder than it had all week, and I was fortunate enough to hit a fine wedge shot to within four feet on 15 to salvage par. Another good approach left me six feet from the cup on 17. I rolled in the birdie and won the match, 3 and 1.

  Stranny’s father was the first person on the green to congratulate me after Frank and I shook hands. What class and generosity of spirit that took, to come forward so enthusiastically and shake the hand of the kid who broke his own son’s heart. You could see the emotion in his eyes as he pumped my hand and wished me well. As Frank and I walked off the green together, he said to me, “That’s it. I’m turning pro tomorrow.”

  The ne
xt day, true to his word, Muss did just that, signing a sponsorship contract with Wilson Sporting Goods.

  I had something more immediate to worry about—an afternoon quarter-final match against Don Cherry, the reigning Canadian Amateur champ. I didn’t know much about Cherry’s game, but I found myself two down to him at the turn and had to battle back to square the match by 16. At the long 17th, both of us missed the green, but I pitched close enough to make four. Cherry bogeyed and we halved 18, meaning I moved on to the semifinal round.

  I don’t remember how I slept the night before the thirty-six-hole semifinal match. I do remember that after beating Cherry, I went straight into the clubhouse and called my parents in Latrobe. They hopped in the car and drove eight hours to Detroit so they could be on hand the next morning. That meant more to me than anyone could ever have known.

  Now it was Friday, and my opponent was Ed Meister, a former Yale golf captain and thirty-six-year-old veteran of thirteen U.S. Amateur campaigns. I’d beaten Meister once in the Ohio Amateur, but neither of us had any inkling we were about to make history at the National Amateur.

  The match was a seesaw battle. I patched together a shaky 76 and was lucky to be one up after the morning round. Neither of us seemed to be on our games, and one sportswriter later reported, “The contestants hit shots that cheered the hearts of duffers in the gallery.” The low point came when we halved the 425-yard 18th with double-bogey sixes. Nerves were killing both of us, I think.

  Meister was one up after twenty-seven holes, but I squared the match on 28 with a fine pitch and run that stopped four feet from the pin. We traded leads twice more and reached the 36th hole all square. This was the darkest moment of the tournament for me. Ed’s drive found the heart of the fairway, and a beautifully struck 5-iron left him eight feet from the pin. My drive was in the rough, and my 5-iron shot flew into a grassy area behind the green. The grass was deep and the green sloped dangerously away from me; I knew I was in big trouble. Meister was looking down the barrel at birdie, and I would have my hands full just to get up and down for par. I lofted a high wedge shot that came to rest five feet above the hole. Meister missed his birdie attempt but tapped in for four.

  Now I faced the ultimate nightmare: the slick downhiller to halve the hole and keep the match alive. I took a long time studying the putt, trying to calm my nerves and remind myself to hit it firmly enough to hold the line. I finally stepped up and stroked the putt and felt massive relief when it dropped into the cup. Later, a reporter asked me how I could take so long over a pressure putt. Perhaps he thought I was joking when I replied that I waited until I was sure I would make it. Fact is, I was dying over that putt, and I needed the time to calm myself down.

  Meister missed another short putt and a chance to win at the first playoff hole; we halved with bogey fives. For the third hole in a row—putts of ten, eight, and five feet, respectively—he’d had the chance to slam the door on me but failed to convert. The same thing happened at the 38th hole. He was sixteen feet from a birdie and the championship—and failed to capitalize. On the par-5 third, I smashed a drive 300 yards to the center of the fairway, then used a 3-iron to reach the green on my second shot. Meister had trouble in the trees, and having left his fourth shot short of the green, conceded the match. He looked physically whipped, and I’m sure I did, too. We didn’t realize it then, but we’d just finished the longest semifinal match in the fifty-four-year history of the U.S. Amateur.

  Bob Sweeny, my opponent for the thirty-six-hole final, was a debonair, forty-three-year-old investment banker from Sands Point, New York. He was movie-star handsome, wealthy, Oxford educated, with a golf swing as smooth as a Rolls-Royce engine. Sweeny was no casual socialite golfer who somehow woke up to find himself contending for the biggest prize in amateur golf. On the contrary, as his 1937 British Amateur title proved, Sweeny was a player’s player—a guy who gave strokes to Ben Hogan, I later learned, when they played together at Seminole in the winter months. He was also one heck of a nice man.

  To look at us side by side, though, you might well have thought we hailed from different galaxies. Sweeny was a middle-aged millionaire, a member of London’s swanky parkland club called Sunningdale, and an international playboy elegantly dressed in crisp pressed linen pants, with the most beautiful young woman I’d ever seen following him like an adoring puppy from hole to hole. I was a twenty-four-year-old ex–coast guardsman and paint salesman with his nervous parents in the gallery.

  I don’t have any memory of Pap giving me advice before the match, though it wouldn’t have been his nature at all to do that. And I can’t even seem to recall what we all did the night before the final. I suppose we went out to an early dinner somewhere and I must have turned in fairly early, as is my habit. I was probably a bit quieter than normal, but I was often quiet before a big match, and I don’t think in this instance I was particularly nervous about meeting Sweeny. I had a lot of confidence in my abilities, and I think I slept pretty well, all things considered.

  The first three holes seemed to indicate, however, that I wasn’t just outclassed but also outmatched. Sweeny calmly rolled three birdie putts into the cup, and I was left standing on the fourth tee wondering what train had hit me. Others among the 3,500 or so spectators watching must have thought the same thing, perhaps sensing a real slaughter in the making. To make matters worse, as we started down the fourth fairway after hitting our tee shots, the beautiful girl following my opponent suddenly came through the ropes and out onto the fairway and waltzed right into his arms, giving him a real double-feature kiss. I remember watching them in disbelief—and maybe a little envy—thinking what a cruel game golf could be. Here I was getting pasted in the tournament I’d always dreamed of winning, and my opponent was not only rich and handsome and hitting perfect golf shots but getting the girl as well! With slumping spirits, I glanced over at my parents, walking quietly along in the gallery. Mother looked worried but smiled her usual reassuring smile. Pap wore his usual stoic face on the evolving drama.

  Sweeny, it seems to me, never let up, never hit what you would call a bad shot. He made me have to come get him, which I did finally on holes eight, nine, and ten, winning them to halve the match. By lunchtime, Sweeny’s twenty-nine putts gave him a 70 on the card versus my 72. He was two up going into the afternoon round.

  At the break, I reminded myself that I wasn’t trying to beat the man on each hole; rather, I figured, if I could play consistently and manage to beat the course, I’d have an excellent chance of beating Sweeny as well.

  This proved to be a wise strategy, one I would attempt to adopt in match-play competition thereafter, because it forces you to keep your concentration where it should be—on the golf course instead of your opponent and the interesting things happening to him. We were nip and tuck all over the final eighteen, and every time I would make a move, he responded with a clutch birdie or a salvaged par to win. On the 22nd hole, for example, I dropped a twenty-five-footer for birdie, but Sweeny came back to win 23 when I carelessly three-putted. I tied the match at the 465-yard 27th with my best 2-iron shot of the week, but Sweeny took the lead at the next hole by nailing a thirty-five-footer for birdie. I caught him again at the 30th hole, and thanks to a burst of fine iron play I finally moved a hole ahead of him at the 32nd.

  A birdie on the 33rd put me two up, but I lost the 35th with a three-putt. My drive at the 36th found the fairway and my second shot safely reached the putting surface. Sweeny’s drive was errant and he couldn’t find his ball. After several minutes of fruitless searching, he looked at me and graciously lifted his arm and called, “Congratulations, Arnie. You win.”

  I confess I felt a bit woozy—the heat, stress, and fatigue of the week’s ordeal all sort of came rushing over me. The sudden elation I felt was almost overwhelming. I gratefully shook Sweeny’s hand, and as I started up the fairway to the green, still a bit dazed, Joe Dey, the wonderful, longtime USGA official who was overseeing the match, came over to me and said, “Mr. Palm
er, if you don’t mind, we’ll call this a one-up victory.” I nodded, unable to speak.

  To this day, I don’t know why Joe insisted on that, but that’s how it reads in the record books, a one-up victory over Robert Sweeny. For his part, Sweeny couldn’t have been more gracious.

  As the media swarmed around us, my mother was the first one to hug me when I walked off the final green. As we embraced, she was crying tears of joy. “Where’s my father?” I called out. “Let’s get Pap in here. He’s the man who really won the U.S. National Amateur.” For several moments I couldn’t find him in the crowd, but suddenly he was there, quietly smiling for the first time that week. I could tell he was happy. As a flurry of cameras clicked around us, he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

  “You did pretty good, boy,” he said simply, and my heart swelled nearly to the breaking point.

  This meant the world to me, and I felt my own tears coming. I’d finally shown my father that I was the best amateur golfer in America. It was the turning point of my life, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as much happiness on a golf course.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Winnie

  My extraordinary week in Detroit proved how quickly lightning can strike in the game of golf. Arriving there, I’d simply been one of a thousand dreamers who’d made it close to the pinnacle of amateur golf, a working-class guy with more grit than polish, more strength than style. But as the rounds of parties commenced and the flood of telegrams from well-wishers seemed to pour in from every direction, the press was suddenly writing head-turning things about me that I suppose I’d never noticed or perhaps simply always took for granted. They wrote about the intense excitement my “come-from-behind” victory and “go-for-broke” style of play seemed to stimulate in galleries; they wrote about the affectionate way I often spoke to spectators and paused to joke around with little kids in the crowd, my changing facial expressions, the lucky red baseball cap I wore all week, my composure under fire, the way I hitched my pants as I walked up a fairway, the openness of my emotions.