A Golfer's Life (6 page)

I’ll never forget the December afternoon we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. It was a cold day and I’d just caddied nine holes for Pap and Dr. Mather. They’d gone into the pro shop to warm up, and I was dearly hoping that was all they planned to play that day. Latrobe winters were difficult and extra-lonely times for me; I hated
the cold because it kept me from being out on the golf course, playing.

The radio in the pro shop was on, and I remember how still everybody became as the announcer described the devastation at Pearl Harbor. I remember my father shaking his head and swearing softly, and I thought that meant there would be no more golf that day. Unfortunately, my father told me to go get the bags because they were going to play another nine. In retrospect, it wasn’t an unpatriotic gesture on his part to go out and play golf after hearing such awful news. He was helpless to do anything about the sneak attack and the arrival of war, and knowing him as I did, I can say that he was probably spitting nails about it and wishing he could personally have a crack at the Japanese. In any event, I made fifty cents for my trouble that afternoon, double my usual rate for carrying a bag.

Being a caddie had other perks. Among them, I was allowed to play the golf course on Mondays with the other caddies, when the course was officially closed. My game, as a result, progressed rapidly. The course had small but moist (or heavy) greens that received a low, hard shot best, so I grew up hitting low-liners that would land and roll rather than high lofted shots that would settle where they landed. Because the course had several demanding tee shots that required almost pinpoint accuracy, I became pretty adept at swinging a 1-iron, a club few if any players carry today and manufacturers never even bother to include in “matched” sets of clubs anymore. Because of its extremely low loft, I found I could get anywhere from 210 to 230 yards from a 1-iron shot. It was often easier to maneuver than a comparable fairway wood, and it helped me bend or shape a shot as needed. As a result, the 1-iron became very useful in my “training” at Latrobe Country Club, a tool I didn’t hesitate to reach for when a shot required deadly accuracy.

Some things never changed, though, like my father’s
attitude about proper boundaries. I won the club’s caddie tournament five times, beginning at about age eleven. But I never got to take the trophy home with me, a fact that deeply disappointed me at the time. Trophies were for other kids, even for other kids who were employees of the club. But they were never for me, and I secretly stewed about that for years.

Even so, with Latrobe’s fairways as my laboratory, my old Walter Hagen driver and Patty Berg brassie, and either a set of Tommy Armour irons or Wilson Top Notch flat-backed blades I got just before high school, I began to experiment with all types of shots, learning how to move the ball by putting a certain spin on it. One area remained a problem for me, though: the short game, chipping and sand shots. For reasons of economy, Latrobe didn’t have many bunkers in those days (sand traps require a lot of attention and are expensive to properly maintain). Also, Pap was a tyrant about people chipping around his greens, and he sure wasn’t going to tolerate my endlessly practicing chip shots. As a result, my chipping and sand shots were the weakest parts of my game for years.

I became obsessed with the idea of practicing, and there’s a little anecdote about this evolving passion that also helps to show the respect my father commanded from the members at Latrobe Country Club. On another hot afternoon when no one was around, I locked up the shop and went to practice hitting balls. Unfortunately, just about then, J. R. Larson, the chairman of the grounds committee—the same man who worried that I swung the club too hard—showed up at the shop, anxious to get his clubs and play a little. He found the place locked up and went to find my father, and soon all hell broke loose.

As Larson looked on, my father chewed me out good, describing
my stubborn unreliability and warning me about the dire consequences of future mistakes, and so on. When he paused for a breath, Larson said to my father, “Tell you what, Deacon. Send him down to the steel mill to work. We’ll straighten him out fast.”

I was surprised by my father’s quick response—and so, I’m sure, was J. R. Larson.

“Don’t tell me what to do with my kid,” Pap snarled at him, perhaps recalling his own time in the steel mills. “You take care of your business, Mr. Larson, and I’ll take care of mine.”

That was Pap’s philosophy to a T, and he didn’t back down from anybody, including powerful club members. For some head professionals that might have been the kiss of death, but on more than one occasion I overheard him say to Harry Saxman, his boss and the club’s longtime president, “Harry, if you don’t like the way I’m doing the job, feel free to go hire somebody else.”

They never did, of course. They knew they would never find a man who worked harder and understood Latrobe Country Club the way Deacon Palmer did.

I
t was also about this time that I started reading books about golf, instruction books and biographies about the game’s greatest players, picking up ideas here or there, even beginning to seriously fantasize about a professional career of my own. I was naturally drawn to the exploits of Bob Jones, and I remember thinking if I could fashion a golf career along the lines of his, that would be a dream come true. Byron Nelson’s writing, his ideas about the golf swing and the way he’d come up through the game from the caddie yard to stardom and treated the game with such personal grace, also had a tremendous influence on me. That still wouldn’t stop me
from beating him or Ben Hogan or Sam Snead or anybody else on the course at Latrobe, though, and sometimes whipping them pretty soundly, on the perfect fairways of my vivid daydreams. I sometimes played two balls, for instance, one for Ben Hogan, say, and one for me: Palmer versus Hogan for the PGA Championship; or one for Byron and one for this brash young upstart named Arnie Palmer with the National Open Championship hanging in the balance. I was such a big dreamer in those days, perhaps because I was alone so much of the time on the course. Sometimes I think that kids these days could really use less planned activities and fewer structured choices and more time alone—time to develop their imaginations, play games, and find out who they really are. Years later, musing about those slow boyhood days, I joked to a reporter that I lost a lot of Opens on the fairways of my imagination. But I won more than my share, too.

My first junior tournament took place the summer I was twelve, at Shannopin Country Club in Pittsburgh. A slightly older golf buddy named Tommy Smith drove us in his parents’ car to the tournament, but when we got there we encountered an unexpected problem. Just before I was scheduled to tee off, I was informed that I was ineligible to play because the tournament was sponsored by the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association, and Latrobe Country Club didn’t belong to the association.

I was stunned, crushed, and angry. I rushed to a phone and called Pap and told him what had happened. He told me to calm down and stay close to the phone. A few minutes later he called back to say he’d spoken with Harry Saxman, who also belonged to nearby Greensburg Country Club. Greensburg, where Tommy Smith’s family belonged, happened to belong to the West Penn Golf Association, and Harry’s novel solution was that I would be declared an “instant” member
of Greensburg Country Club by head professional Perry Delvecchio—and hence be eligible to play.

I shot 82 in the qualifying round, good enough for third or fourth qualifier. I thought that made me pretty hot stuff, to tell the truth, and in the first match the next day I drew a guy named Jack Kunkle from St. Clair Country Club in Pittsburgh. Jack was two years older than me, one of two golfing brothers—the other was named Bob—I would play with for years at junior tournaments around Pittsburgh. I watched Jack hit his first drive off the tee, a blast that sliced straight into the trees, and smiled. I was so cocky that I was sure I already had him beaten, especially since my drive found the heart of the fairway.

Off we went, with Jack in trouble and me already feeling the match was mine. A few hours later, Jack waltzed me in 4 and 3, and I’d learned one of the most valuable lessons of my career: Never take any opponent for granted on a golf course. It was a dose of humility I needed and carry to this day. Play your own game, as my father would have counseled, and mind your own business and you’ll do much better. You control what you do, not what the other guy does. The only good news was that I didn’t need to worry about how I would get to Pittsburgh the rest of the week because I was out of the tournament.

When I was thirteen, my year was full of a lot of junior golf tournament experiences like that around Pittsburgh, Greensburg, and Ligonier, where I met strong junior players I would compete against for years and forged many lasting friendships. My mother used to drive me to these events in the family Chevrolet, and whether I won or lost, played brilliantly or just survived, it didn’t matter to her. Her enthusiasm was unwavering. Pap, on the other hand, seldom saw these early matches because he couldn’t get away from the
course, though he never missed any of the action if the match was played at Latrobe. And if I came home and boasted of thrashing another kid, he would typically nod and remind me with a sobering note of skepticism not to get too cocky and to keep practicing if I knew what was good for me. The implication was, there was always going to be somebody tougher waiting out there to clean my clock and I’d better be prepared. I must admit, I really burned inside to earn a simple compliment from my father. After all, by that age I could routinely get around Latrobe in even par and was already regularly beating the boys on the high school golf team. But that compliment never came, which probably explains why I tried all the harder to please him.

I’m not entirely certain, but I believe that was the summer Babe Didrikson Zaharias came to Latrobe and put on an exhibition match, playing with Pap, me, and a promising young golfer named Pat Harrison, whose daughter is LPGA star Muffin Spencer-Devlin. The Babe was one of the great women of American golf, with sparkling wit and a swing as strong as garlic. I remember how she stepped to the first tee, pegged up her ball, and turned to the gallery and joked, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Hold on for a second while I loosen my girdle …” She proceeded to nail the ball a mile down the fairway with one of the sweetest and most compact swings you’ve ever seen. She made it look so easy.

The crowd ate up her showmanship, and I think I became aware of my own budding desire to show off and please people in that manner. Babe had a flair for the spectacular and the talent and personality to pull it off. Though no one but me realized it then, so did I. Prior to that, the only people I aimed to please with my golf shots were my father and mother. I was always pestering Pap to come watch what I could do in hopes he would praise me, which of course he never really did. That simply wasn’t his style.

But, watching Babe do her thing, it occurred to me how great it would be to make
lots
of people—complete strangers at that—ooh and aah over a golf shot. It’s impossible to say that’s when I realized I loved performing in front of galleries, because the truth is, only a handful of people had ever seen me play in competition up to that point. But something in me was clearly drawn to the kind of public admiration I witnessed that day Babe Didrikson Zaharias came to Latrobe.

I already knew all the names of the game’s greatest stars. But probably the first Tour professional I met about that time was Lew Worsham, older brother of a young man who would soon change my life. At that time Lew was the head professional at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh. The Tour’s season was so short in those days, players invariably kept head professional jobs at clubs. Worsham would capture the U.S. Open in 1947 over Sam Snead in a playoff that was as exciting as any in Open history.

A professional I knew even better and someone who had an even greater influence on me in those days, however, was a guy named Steve Kovach, an unpolished Pittsburgh steel-worker who could simply do magical things with a golf club in his hands. When Byron Nelson saw Steve play at the Canterbury Open in 1946, he commented that Kovach was as good as anybody he’d ever seen. That was no small compliment, and Kovach did have incredible shotmaking skills. I knew this because as a schoolboy golfer I got to play with Steve a great deal around Pittsburgh. He could produce high floating shots that would settle as sweetly as anything you’d ever seen, and I recall how at Ligonier, where the greens were small and the mounds so fierce, he could bounce balls off those slopes like nobody else.

I learned a lot from watching Steve play golf. But I also learned a lot from watching what
happened
to Steve Kovach as the result of his success. Kovach, as I say, was an unpolished
gem, a blue-collar worker whose grasp of proper English was marginal at best. People would snicker when Steve spoke, and reporters made fun of the way he butchered the language while attempting to explain his magical shots. Some well-meaning people got together and paid for Steve to attend language school in Cincinnati. The strategy, however, backfired and only compounded the problem. Steve emerged from these tutorials using—and misusing—big words he scarcely knew the meaning of. The laughter only intensified, and Steve eventually suffered a mental breakdown and wound up in an institution, out of golf. It was a genuinely sad story, and one that I took to heart. My father had drilled into me the importance of knowing who you are and being true to that, not putting up appearances or trying to be something you simply aren’t and can never be.

But I also drew another lesson from Steve’s ordeal—the importance of learning to speak well. I came to understand how the words you say can make or break any situation.

Admittedly, I wasn’t the best student in high school. I made decent marks in math because it had a useful purpose on the golf course (keeping score and tallying up bets), and pretty ordinary ones in English and history. Socially, as difficult as it may be for some people to believe, I was almost painfully shy, at least early on where girls were concerned. Thanks to Cheech, I went out with a number of pretty girls from the Latrobe area, but the idea of having a “serious” girlfriend didn’t enter my mind.