A Golfer's Life (3 page)

Of course, I have a few of my own to tell. If you have a little while, I’d like to tell you some of them.

I
sometimes think it’s odd, and in no small part revealing, what you manage not to forget. In almost fifty years of public life, the shape and strength of my hands have been written about hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times, by writers who saw them as metaphors for what I’ve accomplished and as clues to who I really am. True enough, they’re distinctive in that they are large, gnarled, and unusually strong. A blacksmith’s hands, they’ve been called. Good workingman’s hands. I got these hands from my father, Deacon Palmer.

My two earliest memories involve my father and my hands. I was three years old and we were living in a small house across the street from my paternal grandparents, Alex and Agnes Palmer, on Kingston Street in Youngstown, a small working-class village just outside Latrobe. At that time my father was the head greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club, which he’d helped build with his own hands in the years just prior to my birth in September 1929. As an economic measure to combat the effects of the Great Depression, he would soon also be made “temporary” head professional by the club’s directors—a job he managed to keep, and perform
tirelessly, for over forty years until his death in 1976. But at that moment in time, my world was only about one block long, the distance between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ front porch.

I loved to go over to my grandmother Agnes’s house, because she was a superb baker and always had a special treat for me and my little sister Lois Jean, whom everybody called Cheech. Sometimes it was a fresh piece of pie and chocolate milk, sometimes it was her terrific homemade bread and the wonderful apple butter she made from scratch. I remember a large grapevine growing just outside her kitchen door, and the tart jellies that came from those grapes. On this particular morning, I was carrying a quart of fresh milk up her three front steps when I stumbled and fell on the milk bottle, shattering the glass and slicing open nearly the entire side of my left hand. I remember being frightened, but I don’t remember the pain that surely must have come immediately afterward and as the doctor stitched me up.

I suspect I may have cried—though perhaps not. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t, because even then I knew my father and grandfather were tough and seemingly unsentimental men, and I instinctively knew I wanted to be like them. My grandfather, Alex Jerome Palmer, was a housepainter by trade who served on the Youngstown school board and constantly fought for education funding—a fact that, considering his own minimal education, reveals something impressive about his character or at least his good common sense.

Palmer men did things with their hands and were justifiably proud of that fact. According to family records, Palmers had been scraping out a living on small farms and in the coal mines of the rough Allegheny Mountains since the late 1780s, when they probably arrived in the area as English immigrants. Alex Palmer’s three sons were no different. They were strong willed and independent minded. My father, Milfred Jerome
Palmer, was the oldest, followed by Uncle Francis, or “Spook,” and their kid brother, Harry, or “Dude,” Palmer. For years, at holiday or other family gatherings, whenever these three got together, an argument or debate of some kind was likely to erupt, fueled by blue-collar philosophy and beer. Uncle Francis later went to work for the management at Latrobe Steel, and Uncle Harry, a union man to the core, not only led a strike against the company that briefly turned into a rock-throwing melee, but took to calling his older brother a “scab” until my grandfather put an end to that. A little healthy disagreement was one thing, but Alex Palmer wasn’t going to tolerate rudeness at the family’s dinner table. He had firm ideas about how grown men should behave. Also present was their pair of sisters—my aunts Dorothy, or “Doll,” Palmer and Hazel, the baby sister. I remember how fondly they treated my sister Cheech and me at Thanksgiving and Christmas—the uncles bouncing us around, the aunts constantly trying to feed us more desserts or simply making a fuss over us.

I don’t know who came up with “Cheech” for Lois Jean, but everyone (except perhaps for me) in those days seemed to have a nickname. Exactly how my father got his nickname—“Deacon” or, more commonly, “Deke”—remains a bit of a family mystery. Sometime back when he was a young man, he apparently helped out a local black minister in some kind of trouble, and people took to calling him “Deacon.” Perhaps the name was bestowed in derision or jest. No one knows for sure, and my father certainly wasn’t going to discuss it. In his view, someone else’s troubles were their own business, not a proper subject for public discussion.

While a deacon is an elder of the church who helps the minister caretake the flock, my father never felt comfortable going to the little Lutheran church in Youngstown where Cheech and I were sent every Sunday from the time we could walk until confirmation at around age thirteen. I eventually
came to learn that, even though he wasn’t a church-going man, our father really was a caretaker to many people around town. A man who took care of people regardless of their background or race. A deacon with strong hands. So the name stuck, and it suited him. As I say, most people simply called him Deke.

I called him Pap from the beginning.

Pap was the only Palmer son with a physical disability, a deformed foot from a bout of infantile paralysis that in those times was popularly referred to as a “game foot.” I’m convinced this only made him tougher, doubled his determination to be independent and strong. As a boy, he lifted weights and practiced chin-ups with one arm in order to build his upper-body strength. He could chin himself with either arm at least ten times, and his hands and upper torso, as a result, were splendidly muscled while his hips remained slim, his legs fairly weak.

At about age fifteen, he quit school and went to work at American Locomotive in Latrobe (now Standard Steel) as a mail runner, but he didn’t like being indoors and heard somebody planned to build a golf course a couple of miles from his parents’ house in Youngstown. He knew nothing about golf, even less about growing grass or shaping fairways and greens, but he went out to the site of the new Latrobe Country Club and applied for a job as a laborer. He began his long career at Latrobe Country Club by literally digging ditches on a three-man construction crew.

When the nine-hole course was more or less finished, in 1921, my father, then just seventeen, was asked by Latrobe Steel—which owned most of the stock in the new club—to stay on and help maintain the course. But there was a catch: the job wasn’t a year-round opportunity, and he would be laid off when the golf season ended. After tearing down, cleaning, and repainting every piece of the club’s maintenance
equipment, he remedied this shortfall by finding a second job running the poolroom at the Youngstown Hotel, a pretty rough-and-tumble place where local workingmen, including several Polish and Slovak men who would eventually come to work for him at the golf course and become like surrogate uncles to me, relaxed and drank shots of whiskey with their beers, wagered on pool, and sometimes got into fistfights. Thanks to his weight lifting, Pap was a young bull nobody dared give much lip to.

Pap’s personality and character, I see now, from the vantage point of many years, undoubtedly was shaped by those years struggling to teach himself to walk again, long before there were doctors and rehabilitation programs to help people manage the various difficulties associated with types of polio. His father drilled into him the importance of doing a job to the best of your abilities, never complaining about your lot, and always conducting yourself with as much dignity as possible. Early in his married life to my mother, for example, Pap worked a second job at night in the steel mill to bring in extra family income. According to Mother and others, he worked so hard (at a job he hated, no less) he sometimes angered the other workers, and one night some fella tried to spill molten metal on him. I don’t know what came of that incident, but if I’d been that man I sure wouldn’t have wanted to have met Pap in the alleyway after work that night.

Because of his handicap, Pap learned he had to be tougher than the next fellow, regardless of his social position. As a result, I think, he developed even more rigid beliefs about what was right and what was wrong, what a good man did or didn’t do. You didn’t borrow money. You didn’t take what wasn’t yours; you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal. If you did any of those things, you weren’t anybody in Deacon Palmer’s eyes.

Once, as a boy of about five, I lifted a packet of glue from the drugstore in Youngstown, just slipped it into my pocket
and sidled nonchalantly out the door. I was nuts about building model airplanes in those days. Anyway, I’d barely reached the pavement out front when I began to worry that someone had seen me or would somehow find out and tell my pap what I’d done. The truly amazing thing is, I worried about that theft for the next sixty-five years, and the truth is I
still
worry a little bit that my father, wherever he is, will somehow find out I took that glue and lower the boom on me.

Pap wasn’t big on spanking either Cheech or me. He left that task to our mother, Doris Palmer—and she did it only once, as far as I can remember, when Cheech and I burst out laughing at her after she tried to discipline us for some rules infraction. But the sound of his voice—combined with the size of his hands and their potential menace—was almost enough to freeze me in my tracks and set my bony knees quaking when I was caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

I
began this reflection by saying I had two earliest memories involving Pap and hands. Here is the other one: When I was three, perhaps just before or some time after the broken milk bottle incident, my father put my hands in his and placed them around the shaft of a cut-down women’s golf club. He showed me the classic overlap, or Vardon, grip—the proper grip for a good golf swing, he said—and told me to hit the golf ball. Because the Vardon grip involves overlapping the small finger of one hand on the index finger of the other, it’s not the easiest grip for a small-fry to master. But an easier, baseball, grip would never have done, so I worked hard to learn the grip Pap showed me. It probably helped that my hands were larger than the average kid’s.

His initial thoughts on the golf swing weren’t complicated, though. “Hit it
hard
, boy,” he said simply. “Go find it and hit it hard again.”

Pap took basic lessons from the Latrobe Country Club’s first professional, a Scotsman named Davy Brand, and spent years refining his own swing enough to become a solid single-digit handicapper. Even though by this time he was regularly giving lessons to members, that was pretty much all the swing instruction he gave me for many years.
Get the right grip. Hit the ball hard. Go find the ball, boy, and hit it hard again …

From the beginning I took his advice to heart and swung at the ball so hard I often toppled over. I remember how a prominent member once saw me take a cut at the ball and commented to him, “Deacon, you better do something about that kid’s swing. He swings so hard, he can’t even stay on his feet.” Without missing a beat, my pap leveled his gaze at this member and told him in no uncertain terms, “Dammit, J.R., you let me worry about the kid and you take care of your own game, all right?” Years later, after I began to have some success in junior golf and even when I was first playing on the PGA Tour, well-meaning people would watch me slug a golf ball with my unique and essentially homemade golf swing—a corkscrewing motion that relied almost entirely on my great upper-body strength, producing low-boring shots that seldom rose above eye level and flew a long way in the form of a bold draw and the occasional monstrous hook—and offer me tips and insights about how I could improve and refine it. Others marveled that it worked as well as it did.

A case in point is an incident that took place on the practice tee at Chick Harbert’s club in Detroit during my rookie year on the Tour in 1955. I was hitting balls with my driver when I realized George Fazio and Tony Penna were standing there watching me. I knew Fazio a bit—he once gave me a lift when I was hitchhiking back to Wake Forest, a funny story I’ll get to in a while—but Penna was a ball-striking legend. I really wanted to show off, so I teed up some balls and let out the shaft, pounding drives to the rear of the range.

I heard Penna ask Fazio if he knew who I was.

“Sure. That’s this kid Arnold Palmer. He just won the National Amateur.”

“Well, better tell him to get a job,” Penna said with unmistakable disdain, almost mockery. “With that swing of his, he’ll
never
make it out here.”

I really burned inside at that remark. Many years later, after I’d won the Bob Hope Classic for the third time, I saw Tony again. He came up to me and winked and said, in that same slightly mocking voice, “Palmer, you’re beginning to swing that club pretty good.”

I guess I was. The point is, early on my views about the golf swing—and, for that matter, life in general—were shaped by a man who believed in the virtues of hard work and following the rules but essentially doing things your own way in this world.

Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing—and it’s a tribute to him that anytime I ever got in trouble with my swing, lost the feel or touch in a shot, it was usually because I became enamored of some popular teacher’s ideas about the “mechanics” of the golf swing and gave their advice a try, often really screwing myself up for a time.

Mine was, and remains, almost the antithesis of a “mechanical” golf swing. Everybody has their theories about what makes a good golf swing, but Pap’s basic premise was that once you learned the proper grip and understood the fundamental motion behind the swing, the trick was to find the swing that worked best for you and your body type, maximized your power. The rest of it was a lifelong learning process of refinement by trial and error, seeing what worked by how the club felt in your hands. Even at the pinnacle of my success in the middle 1960s, I would be practicing at
Latrobe for hours, beating balls like you wouldn’t believe, and look up to discover him watching me. Typically, he might make some small comment about my swing, but overall he didn’t have much to say on the subject. It was inconceivable to think of a Sam Snead or Byron Nelson consulting a swing doctor or even asking another Tour professional for advice on their golf swings. As Ben Hogan later said, the answer was in the dirt, and pounding balls was the only way to find it. That was pretty much my father’s attitude, too. And it inevitably became mine.