A Golfer's Life (7 page)

I guess at that time I was much more comfortable beating my buddies on the golf course or playing football and baseball with them. Those two sports were the reigning kings around Latrobe, and, despite my relatively small size, I earned letters playing halfback and defensive tackle in junior high school. I went out for the football team my freshman year at Latrobe High only to be told by the coach, Bill Yates,
that the team didn’t have a uniform for me. This really stung. I was so upset I went home and told Pap, who, instead of being sympathetic, really chewed me out. “Boy,” he said, “you shouldn’t be playing football anyway. If you really want to play golf, stick to that!”

Ironically, I grew a lot physically over the next year, and by the time my sophomore year rolled around, Yates, who was also the school golf coach, almost begged me to come out for football. By then it was too late, though. Ken Bowman played on both teams, but I had no interest in playing anything but golf.

My first high school match was against a kid named Bill Danko, now a retired radiologist in Los Angeles whom I still see from time to time. Bill was from Jeanette High School, a powerful lefty, really a very good player and a heck of a nice guy. I was nervous as hell the first time we played, but I shot 71 and somehow beat him. We played two matches a year for the next four years, and Bill got close many times but never managed to beat me. He remains a good sport about it.

I was progressing fairly rapidly now. My first West Penn Amateur came at fifteen—I finished second and was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t win. Lew Worsham wasn’t the only golfer to have a great year in 1946. That was my junior year at Latrobe, when things really began to take off for me. First I won the West Penn Junior title and, later that fall, with Ken Bowman as a caddie, the PIAA, or state high school championship, on one of the fine old courses at Penn State. We hitched a ride to State College, I remember, with the tennis team because my usual ride to tournaments, my mother, was home with a new baby, my brother, Jerry.

Something important happened in the final match at Penn State that, in retrospect, would become another so-called signature of my game—though it was hardly a conscious thing at the time. Somewhere near the end of the match, holding a
slight lead, I found my ball in the heavy rough with only a narrow gap through the trees to the green. An errant shot like that was fairly typical—I had them all the time at Latrobe—the result of my aggressively strong swing. The smart play was to pitch the ball back to the fairway. The truth is, though, that thought never really entered my head. There was no way I was
not
going for broke at that green, because I knew I could pull off that shot. I selected a 5-iron and fired my ball through the trees, right up onto the green. For the first time, there was a little gallery following me, and I remember how enthusiastically they cheered over that shot. Their response genuinely surprised me. They loved it … and so did I. For years I’d been motivated to hit spectacular shots principally in order to please my father; now, like Babe Zaharias, I had it within my grasp to please people I didn’t even know with my golfing skills! What a thrill!

Something else happened that summer that would have a lasting impact on how I approached and played the game. Both my parents were on hand to watch my match in the West Penn Junior finals. Frustrated at having missed a short putt, I turned and threw my putter in disgust over the gallery and some small trees. My elation at winning quickly vanished when I was greeted with dead stone silence in the family car. “If you ever throw a club like that again,” my father told me, barely restraining his fury, “you’ll never play in another golf tournament.”

I remember what a long ride back to Latrobe it was. Thank God my mother was there, slipping me affectionate quiet glances to let me know how proud she was of me. I know my father was brimming with pride as well, but I’d violated one of his cardinal rules about life and golf—that learning to be a gracious loser is at least as important as being a gracious winner. Being an
ungracious
winner was perhaps the worst thing he could imagine.

I was enough like my mother, I guess, that I was incapable of hiding my emotions at either winning or losing. But thanks to Pap, I learned the value of never publicly displaying my frustration—frustration every golfer experiences—and keeping my emotions in the bottle when I lost, regardless of the depth of the disappointment, of which there would be plenty. More to the point, I never threw a club like that in anger again. At least not when my father was anywhere around to see it.

I also played for the first time that summer in the Hearst juniors at Oakland Hills in Detroit. Al Watrous, whom Bob Jones once beat to capture the British Open at Lytham, was the head professional there, and I was pretty excited about meeting him. Unfortunately, it turned out that Watrous was coaching a player named Mac Hunter, my opponent in the finals, whose father, Willie, was head professional at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. I suppose you could call it healthy home-field advantage. In any event, it wasn’t my time to win and Hunter beat me by a significant margin. I vowed I would go back the next year an improved player and take the Hearst title from him.

Something else happened at Detroit, though, that would have far greater impact on my career and life than winning the tournament, which, by the way, I never managed to do. It was there I met Buddy Worsham, the younger brother of Lew, soon to be the new National Open champion. His family called him “Bubby,” a nickname that didn’t suit him, in my mind. I called him “Bud” from day one—it simply seemed to suit him better. Bud and I were the same age and loved to horse around. We liked the same kinds of foods and the same kinds of girls (we were both painfully shy, but he was even shyer than me, if that was possible), and our rambunctious boyish personalities meshed wonderfully even if our golf games were distinctly different. For one thing, Bud had severed a tendon in his leg as a child and walked with a noticeable limp. Amazingly, he taught himself to stand on
one leg and hit a golf ball, a feat that always astounded me because he could hit it a mile that way. Both of us hailed from golf families and wanted to be professionals ourselves.

I did make it back to the Hearst National Junior Championship the next year, the summer of 1947. It was conducted at the now-defunct California Country Club in Los Angeles. Bud Worsham and I rode the train west together, and perhaps the long two-day train ride exhausted me, or maybe I simply wanted—or expected—to capture that Hearst title too much. In any case, I was eliminated in the first round.

This hurt, because my golf game seemed to be at the top of its form. That year I would win both the West Penn Junior and West Penn Amateur titles (the first of my five WPA titles), capture my second straight Pennsylvania schoolboy championship held at Penn State, win a host of smaller invitational tournaments, and even make the semifinals of the Pennsylvania Amateur Championship.

But the whole way west to California on the train, Bud Worsham talked up a storm about where he was going to college. Some place down south called Wake Forest. Down there, Bud said, you could play golf
all winter long
and never have to interrupt your game for cold weather. That sounded great to me, almost too good to be true. The winters in Latrobe, as I’ve admitted, sometimes really got me down. Maybe at least as impressive to me, Bud had been offered a full athletic scholarship to play golf at Wake Forest—full tuition, room and board, the whole nine yards.

The truth was, I hadn’t really given a whole lot of thought to going to college. Part of me, I suppose, thought I might join the U.S. Army to get my military service out of the way—World War II was over, but the draft was still in business—then come out and turn professional and try my luck at tournament golf. Thanks to my handsome schoolboy press clippings in Pennsylvania, Penn State and the University of
Pittsburgh had expressed some interest in me, both of which offered full-tuition scholarships but not one penny of room and board.

My family wasn’t in the kind of financial position to pay for my feeding and housing elsewhere. Pap and I had talked about college and pretty much decided that if I couldn’t find a full ride like the one Bud had received from Wake Forest College, wherever it was, then I’d stay put at home, work at the club to make money, and maybe attend classes at St. Vincent College in Latrobe to try to earn a business degree.

As we headed over the rails to the Hearst tournament, though, Bud’s bright idea was that maybe he could convince the powers at Wake Forest, specifically Jim Weaver, the school’s athletic director, to give me a similar deal. It was almost too late—the start of the fall term was literally days away at that point—but Bud called Jim Weaver from California and I called my mother and asked her to hurriedly send my high school transcripts to Wake Forest, a place I knew nothing about except it was
somewhere
in North Carolina and sounded like heaven.

My disappointment at being knocked out early at the Hearst tournament was quickly tempered by a letter I received a few days after I got home. My mother, fittingly enough, gave me the letter from Wake Forest offering me the same full scholarship deal as Bud Worsham got.

I’d never been south of the Pennsylvania state line, but there was no question which direction I was headed.

I
n the spring of 1997, a special gathering took place at the Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando, Florida. Twenty-six of the world’s finest collegiate golfers assembled to contest the first-ever Palmer Cup, a three-day team match-play tournament modeled after the popular biennial Ryder Cup matches, pitting the best young players of America against their British and Irish counterparts. The event was the brainchild of several prominent college golf coaches, and I was proud to have my name on the cup and be a title sponsor and host of the fledgling event, because, as the Ryder Cup’s success proves, playing for pride and country invariably makes for thrilling drama. This tournament was no exception. The Americans won going away, but everyone who was involved with the event, I think, went away smiling, and believing that a valuable contribution to the game had been made and perhaps a new tradition born.

On a more personal level, though, the Palmer Cup symbolizes the deep and somewhat complicated feelings I have about the amateur golf of my own collegiate days playing for Wake Forest College. In many ways, they were among the
happiest years of my life, where, out from under my father’s stern sphere of influence for the very first time, I spread my wings and had a hell of a lot of fun, forged a host of lifelong friendships, and got my first taste of winning golf tournaments on a national level. With freedom comes joy and pain, though, and in other ways the education I got at Wake was far more than I bargained for. Amid the winning and friendships I learned what real emotional pain felt like, because of some of the saddest days of my life.

When I periodically go back to visit the sprawling modern Wake Forest University campus that now occupies a particularly lovely corner of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I’m struck by how powerfully life can change in half a century. To begin with, obviously, Wake is no longer the sleepy Baptist college I discovered tucked off in the pine woods east of Durham—it’s now a major, thriving university with over 6,000 undergrads and graduate students, home to a world-class medical teaching hospital and a respected law school. Its academic programs are distinguished, and its sports programs, as they say, are big time. Eventually, if plans go as hoped, and my lobbying efforts on the board of trustees yield dividends, Wake may eventually become home to a world-class collegiate golf course facility created by Palmer Course Design.

That eventuality would have more than symbolic meaning to me, because fifty years ago, using wheelbarrows and shovels, during a lull in studies during our sophomore year, Bud Worsham and I and a few other members of the Wake golf team built the college’s first grass greens, replacing the modest nine-hole course’s original sand greens with something that at least resembled a competitive putting surface. As I recall, the athletic department paid us fifty cents an hour for our efforts, and we were very proud of our handiwork, though I
doubt very much that the administration—or, for that matter, anybody but us really—expected the improved practice grounds to increase Wake’s chances of achieving golf prominence.

The truth is, in those days Wake’s golf team was something of a doormat in the old Southern Conference. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the dominant conference power, underscored by the presence of Harvie Ward, the best amateur player in the country at the time. Duke University was a close second, thanks to Art Wall and Mike Souchak. Sixteen miles to the south, North Carolina State was also considered a comer, with Jim McNair and a host of young and promising southern-bred golfers on board.

Nationally, it was a fertile time in collegiate golf. Dow Finsterwald, who would win the 1958 PGA Championship and become one of my closest friends on the PGA Tour, was at Ohio University, and Ken Venturi—the man I would battle down to the wire in the 1960 Masters and then again in the 1964 U.S. Open—was already making a name for himself at San Jose State. Gene Littler, the Open’s 1961 champion, was at San Diego State. And North Texas State, meanwhile, was something close to a collegiate golf dynasty with the likes of Don January, Billy Maxwell, and Joe Conrad.

Wake had a long history of producing great teachers and ministers, not athletic stars—certainly not golf stars. In a sense, my unheralded arrival at the campus in the fall of 1947 pretty well summarizes that complacent atmosphere. After a long overnight bus ride from Pennsylvania, during which I slept only in fits and starts, I literally got off the bus in the hot and sleepy village of Wake Forest with only my golf bag and suitcase in hand. The bus drove off, and there I stood on a loop of U.S. Highway 1, the town circle, wondering where the blazes to go next.