A Golfer's Life (27 page)

I knew what I needed to do and was in position to do just that. From tee to green, I’d played almost as well as I ever have, missing only four greens that day, twice reaching critical par 5s in two. All I needed was a birdie at 18 and I would have my second U.S. Open title in storybook fashion. But the hole is hardly a cream puff. It measures 465 yards and is studded with menacing bunkers. I hit maybe my best drive of the day to the heart of the fairway, then slashed a superb 4-iron shot to ten feet of the cup. I was certain I would make the putt, but once again I didn’t.

After the regulation seventy-two holes of play, the United States Open Championship was tied, with a playoff scheduled for Sunday.

Winnie, Pap, and I drove home afterward to Latrobe, an hour away, and I remember feeling a little drained by my experience, replaying in my head blown opportunities and my failure to make a birdie when I needed it. On the other hand, despite all those depressing three-putts, I was relieved to still be in the hunt. By the finish, I would collect thirteen three-putts to Jack’s one—and therein lies the tale, as far as I’m concerned.

The point is, as we all understand, that you never know what will happen in golf. The conventional view is that Oakmont was an Open I should have won because I was the better player at the time. Well, “should have” and “did” may be neighbors, but they don’t always get along. Still, I was going to do my level best at Oakmont to make sure they did. Winnie, Pap, and I had a quiet dinner, and I slept well and got up
early, ready to charge to the golf course in Pittsburgh and take care of business.

But I fell behind right from the start, and after Jack rolled a birdie into the cup at the sixth hole, I was already four strokes down. The crowds were eerily silent at that point, as though they were spectators at a state funeral. When I rallied, though, they rallied and cheered me on. I briefly got a charge going with birdies at nine, 11, and 12. That drew me to within a stroke of Jack. As my playing history showed, that was my preferred position, having to mount a charge and close hard upon the front-runner.

But, suddenly, that equation was different—or should I say the front-runner was different. In the past, whenever I mounted a charge I could almost
feel
that the player I was chasing was going to collapse and give ground. It sounds a bit odd, but it was almost as if I could will the leader to move over and permit me to pass. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I was a far better closer than a front-runner. So it can be argued that after a trio of birdies got me back in the hunt, I was exactly where I needed to be.

But Jack Nicklaus was a different animal altogether, completely unlike anybody I’d ever chased. For one thing, he didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered by the electricity of my charge and the lusty cries of my supporters. If anything, they seemed to drive him further into that hard cocoon of concentration he showed the world. But it would take the world years to fully appreciate how difficult a chore that was and how well he executed it. I had never seen anyone who could stay focused the way he did—and I’ve never seen anyone with the same ability since. In my view, that’s why Jack Nicklaus became the most accomplished player in the history of the game.

You just couldn’t crack that concentration. He had his own
game plan and he stuck to it, come hell or high water—or even noisy hometown fans.

Once again, though, it was my own traitorous flatstick that did me in. I three-putted the 13th green, fell two strokes, and never recovered. Despite a drive into the rough at 18, Jack won his first U.S. Open, and a little bit later I reflected to a reporter, “I’ll tell you something. Now that the big guy is out of the cage, everybody better run for cover.”

Then I went and found Winnie, who gave me the same big kiss she always gave me, win or lose, and we drove home to Latrobe.

T
he popular historical view is that I was a dominant force in the next four Open championships and a major factor in Opens for at least the next decade. I would agree with that assessment, and note that by my own calculations, poor chipping and putting on Open greens cost me at least three Open titles, maybe even a shot at the fourth.

Not long ago, Doc Giffin asked me an intriguing question. “Arnold,” he said (because he always calls me “Arnold”), “if you could have one mulligan anywhere in your career, where would you use it?”

I thought about it a moment and cheekily replied, “I’d divide it several ways.”

Certainly the eight-footer to win at Oakmont would be the first part.

The second part I’d spend at Brookline, the very next summer, in 1963.

I arrived at the Country Club, on the fiftieth anniversary of Francis Ouimet’s miraculous 1913 win over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in a virtual dead heat with Jack Nicklaus for the Tour money title, and, thanks to a rare month off, my game
was rested but pretty well tuned. In thirteen tournaments I’d already registered four wins and five other top-ten finishes, one of my strongest starts ever, but Jack was also winning tournaments at an impressive clip, causing some in the press to openly wonder if I was beginning to slip a notch or two. The truth is, I was distracted by a seemingly endless array of new business deals brought my way by Mark McCormack, my business manager, by a new airplane, and by other factors that come with the kind of success I was suddenly enjoying. But my game, as my record that year indicated, was essentially fine. I simply needed that four-week rest from the public eye, and I got it, and I came back raring to go.

The week before Brookline, after defeating Paul Harney in a playoff to take the Thunderbird Classic, I traveled to Massachusetts and immediately liked what I saw of the Country Club’s old-style meandering course, which placed a premium on accurate driving and intelligent shots to small greens. I hoped the more northern grasses would also mean the putting surfaces were a touch slower, and therefore more to my liking, though that didn’t turn out to be the case.

The weather was a major factor in producing unusually high scores, cold blustery winds that constantly shifted direction, tossing balls hither and yon. Meanwhile, the USGA was up to its old tricks with the greens and rough, difficult to read, harder to play. I didn’t play particularly well, in the first three rounds going 73-69-77. Most unexpectedly, Jack failed to make the cut, and I remember feeling slightly out of synch, never quite able to find my stride and get my rhythm going. I was lucky enough to hang on with a final-round 74 and find myself in a three-way tie with Jacky Cupit and Julius Boros at the end of regulation play. Our 293s were the highest scores to lead after seventy-two holes since 1935, when Sam Parks won at Oakmont with 299. Perhaps five other men had an opportunity to win it outright, including
Tony Lema, Paul Harney, and even young Bruce Crampton. But none of them could convert when they needed to, and the Open did an odd reprise of its celebrated 1913 three-man playoff.

For me, the critical moment in the playoff came in the 11th-hole fairway. Boros, typically chipping and putting like Old Man River, was four strokes ahead, and if there was a moment for me to make my charge, it ought to have been then. After a bogey at the tenth, I tried to put some extra mustard on my drive, but it strayed, and I found my ball sitting in a rotten stump off the left side of the fairway.

I had three choices: accept the penalty, which amounted to two strokes, drop out of the stump or hit another drive, or else play the ball as it lay. There was doubt in my mind what I needed to do. But I had no margin to squander strokes, so I took out a 4-iron, figuring to simply advance the ball back onto the fairway and make a good recovery from there.

I hacked three times at the ball before I freed it from that damned stump. Once again my bold style of play had mortally wounded me. I made seven on the hole and finished six strokes back of Julius with a dismal 76. If I had it to do over—or if I had one of Doc’s magic mulligans—I might have gone back to the tee and hit my drive over, because you never know what might happen. I might also spend my “doover” on the short putt I missed at 17 in the final round, a devastating miss that might have given me the championship outright.

But golf is not a game of what might have been. It’s a game of who did what when it counted.

What happened, of course, was that Julius Boros glided home with that magnificent flowing swing of his to become, at age forty-three, the second-oldest man since Ted Ray to capture an Open championship. It seemed oddly fitting, given all the history surrounding that hallowed ground.

But for the second year in a row, I’d lost the Open in a playoff, and frankly it hurt like hell.

T
he next year, at Congressional Country Club in Washington, I was the only man to break par 70 in the opening round of the U.S. Open, on a lush, green, newly irrigated course that had been stretched to 7,053 yards, making it the longest Open test ever. Washington was in the midst of a terrible heat wave and a drought that wilted the hopes of almost everybody, including me. My scoring grew worse with every round, and I finished in fifth place. Coming back from years of disappointment, Ken Venturi walked slowly home, dazed by the hundred-degree heat, and heroically claimed his well-deserved U.S. Open title.

When I shot 76-76 and missed the Open cut at Bellerive in St. Louis in June of 1965, the talk that my game was foundering reached a near-fever pitch in the press. I heard it nearly everywhere I went and I saw it in people’s faces: I wasn’t striking the ball with the same old zest and derring-do; I wasn’t fearless over putts anymore; I didn’t attack golf courses the way I always had.… 
What on earth is wrong with Arnie?

The Big Slump had struck. That’s what was wrong with Arnie. My desire to win golf tournaments was as strong as it had ever been, but I suddenly couldn’t seem to get the ball in the hole when it counted.

This is as good a point as any to talk about something I’ve been thinking about, in this respect, for many years. Namely, why did I begin in late 1964 to lose that magical ability to charge and capture major golf tournaments? As my record indicates, I played extremely well in most of the major championships for the next decade, but it’s undeniably true that, as the press detected, something
was
different about my game.

Most golfers win tournaments, and certainly U.S. Opens, by avoiding mistakes. But I typically won my most important tournaments by overcoming mine. Charlie Sifford once noted that I was the most aggressive player in the history of the game. It’s entirely possible that’s true.

If the downside of that signature trait is that I was capable of risking—and losing—everything on a low-percentage shot that could take me from hero to goat in one swing, the reverse was also equally true. Faced with a situation like the one that I found at Cherry Hills, it never entered my mind that I
couldn’t
pull off a so-called miracle finish. The doubt never entered my mind.

When Sam Snead commented that every time I drove the ball, it looked as if I was trying to hole my tee shot, he wasn’t far off the mark. The way I looked at any shot was that if you played it as boldly as you could, you were guaranteed to have the results you desired at least some of the time. In my mind, that far outweighed the benefit of playing conservatively. It was precisely this quality, I’m convinced, whatever that elusive mental “it” may be, that enabled me to win the tournaments I won—certainly the majors.

Magnified by the unprecedented media coverage my life and my career received, the historic charge that made Cherry Hills such a memorable Open for my fans and transformed my life also made my inevitable collapses (like losing the Masters to Gary Player the very next spring, as well as the National Opens I all but had in my grasp) all the more vivid and painful for people to watch. In time, those major disappointments and losses even took a toll on me. Permit me to explain.

Before I had the hopes of an entire
Army
resting on my shoulders with every shot, the consequences of failing to pull off a successful charge were pretty much mine alone to bear. Prior to 1964, it hurt like hell to blow a big tournament the
way I did at Brookline or three-putt my way out of the championship the way I did at Oakmont in ’62. But the disappointment never lasted long and certainly didn’t affect the way I attacked a golf course. By nature, I simply wasn’t prone to dwell for long on failure or moan about my fate. That was the Deke Palmer in me, I guess.

But after Cherry Hills, the British Open titles, and three more Masters championships came my way, I can see now, from the vantage point of many years, there was a subtle but perceptible shift in my playing consciousness. Yes, the distractions of fame and demands of a burgeoning business life were many, and I’m certain they had some impact on my ability to focus during a golf tournament, though how much I still can’t say. But the truth is, as Mark McCormack once pointed out, it was nice to have those distractions on which to blame my slump, like the one that struck me hard in 1965.

But here is the critical point. Somewhere about the time I won my last major championship in 1964—and I’m still not certain when this phenomenon began to occur—even I became slowly aware that I wasn’t playing tournaments with the same indifference to consequences that had carried me to the summit seven times (eight if you count my National Amateur title, which I do).

Not to place too fine a point on it, somewhere along the way, the elusive “it” that defined my style of play and enabled me to go for broke after any prize I hungered for began to change, slip away, or simply evade my summons. For example, I would step up to a long putt, pause a moment, and think about the potential danger of running a bold effort too far past the hole—something that once would never have been part of my thought process. Furthermore, I would stand on a tee studying a difficult fairway and—without even realizing what was going on at first—feel deep inside that, above all else, at
this critical juncture of the tournament, I didn’t want to disappoint my fans by making a poor shot or a gamble that failed. In simplest language, I began to sometimes get careful when I shouldn’t have. Without even realizing it, I was playing defensively—playing, at times, not to lose rather than to win. Frankly, once I started down that road, it was all but impossible to come back.