A Golfer's Life (10 page)

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. Luckily, 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.

“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.

D
uring 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.

M
y 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 business 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: