A Golfer's Life (8 page)

I saw a group of handsome brick buildings and decided
that must be the college and started walking that way, ending up a little while later by an open office door in the school gymnasium. Two men were sitting in a small office talking. When they saw me, timidly loitering just outside the doorway, the larger one asked with a deep southern voice what I wanted. I told him I was looking for Jim Weaver. I saw the men exchange glances. The other man, I soon learned, was Peahead Walker, the school’s football coach.

“Who the hell are you?” the first man asked.

“Arnold Palmer,” I told him, swallowing dryly.

He gave me a small smile. “Well, Mr. Palmer,” said Jim Weaver, getting up to offer me his hand, “welcome to Wake Forest College.”

I was told to report to a rooming house on the circle that was owned by Johnny Johnston’s mother. Johnny, the school’s golf coach, was finishing his military service, and except for weekend leaves wouldn’t return to campus until the spring of my freshman year, so in the meantime we had Jim Weaver as a coach. What I failed to realize then was that Weaver, who really didn’t know all that much about golf, was itching to show the rest of the conference that Wake would be a pushover no more. Weaver was a born competitor and terrific motivator, a large man with a big heart and bear-like enthusiasm, qualities that made him a great choice to become the Atlantic Coast Conference’s first commissioner. Jim was still smarting, I think, from a remark made to him not long before by Carolina’s golf coach, Chuck Erickson, who confidently assured him Carolina’s crop of golf prodigies would wipe Wake’s collective derriere on the golf course, though in language slightly less suitable for use on a Baptist college campus. These were fighting words to Big Jim Weaver.

Besides, Wake Forest wasn’t without promising young guns of its own. Mickey Gallagher and Sonny Harris were solid veteran players and constituted the team’s nucleus, while
Bud Worsham and I were the highly touted newcomers. Jim Flick was also there on a combined golf and basketball scholarship. And a year behind us would come a couple of fellas named Dick Tiddy and Sandy Burton.

The highlight of my freshman year, just about the time Johnny Johnston returned from the U.S. Air Force, was beating Harvie Ward and Art Wall at Pinehurst Number 2 to win the Southern Conference championship. I’m sure many of the reporters on hand considered this a major upset—Harvie, after all, was considered by many to be the best collegiate player in the country—but I never had any doubt in my mind that I could beat them or anybody else. The tournament was medal play, and I remember watching Harvie play the final hole, needing to make two to tie me. He made it very interesting to the last shot—nearly holing out his approach. When my heart started beating again, I realized I’d won my first Southern Conference championship and Jim Weaver was nearly out of his mind with happiness.

I came home that summer bubbling with confidence and with a college-boy spring in my step and won the Sunnehanna Amateur and reached the semifinals of the North and South Amateur. My routine was now a little more varied and fun. I still worked most mornings for my father at the club—mowing grass or tending the shop, whatever he told me to do—but thanks to Harry Saxman and other prominent members at Latrobe, I was more or less accorded membership status and was free to play the golf course as much as I wanted to in the afternoons. I suppose it’s fair to say I was thoroughly obsessed with golf, thinking of little else and practicing long hours every day before hanging out with my old gang at night. That summer I flew to Memphis, Tennessee, and met a man named William Barrett, Jr., in the first round of the United States Amateur championship at Colonial Country Club. I felt pretty confident about my chances,
but as one of the youngest players in the field I also remember feeling a little awed by the fact that this was the most coveted amateur event in the world.

As strange as it sounds, perhaps I was both a little bit too awed
and
cocky—both being major sins in my father’s eyes. I failed to play as well as I should have and was beaten fairly handily, 6 and 5, by the much older Barrett in the first round. I took losing hard, mentally kicking myself for a number of missed opportunities. But once I’d resolved to fight my way back to the Amateur the next year and go deeper into the rounds of competition, the pain of disappointment was muted by a friend of my father’s named Bob Thompson. He invited me over to a big invitational tournament in Indiana, where we really cleaned up in the Calcutta portion of the tournament and I almost won the regular tournament. I did win several smaller pro-am and regional invitational tournaments that summer, and I had more pocket change than I’d dreamed of.

By summer’s end, though, I couldn’t wait to get back to Wake and see Bud and resume my college life. Wake Forest was a Baptist-affiliated institution, which, in those days, allowed no drinking or dancing on campus. Students were required to take their partying and social life elsewhere, usually to taverns and hotels in Durham or Raleigh, a drive of about twenty miles over twisting backcountry roads. I understood the scriptural basis for such a policy, but, quite frankly, even now I question the wisdom of segregating a young person’s academic life from his social one. The fact is, there were a lot of unsupervised parties off campus in those days. Like Pap used to, I now think the school’s rigidity on this issue probably contributed to underage drinking problems and made consuming alcohol seem much more glamorous than need be, by extension increasing the possibility of irresponsible driving.

Socially and academically, Bud and I had a system of sorts worked out where we more or less looked after each other. Our strengths and weaknesses beautifully complemented each other’s. I had a stronger physical constitution that allowed me to handle alcohol, sometimes showing little or no effects, so I was always the one who drove Bud’s Buick when we went out on dates or in a group to party in Durham or Raleigh. As I’ve said, Bud was shyer than me, so it was left to me to speak to girls and arrange our “dates,” if you want to call them that.

On the academic front, Bud had a strong work ethic and was forever on my case about keeping up my grade point average to avoid losing my scholarship and being put on academic probation, or worse, getting kicked out of school and probably drafted. Quite honestly, I really wasn’t much of a student. For a while I thought fleetingly about a career in law but then switched to a business major, figuring that I could at least graduate to a nice businessman’s job somewhere that would allow me the freedom to make a decent living
and
play the kind of top amateur golf I envisioned myself playing.

The idea of turning touring professional was also always somewhere in the back of my mind, I must confess, but not if it involved having to do the kind of demeaning jobs I’d always seen Pap do in order to support my family. Several years after my college days, I commented to a reporter that above all else I was determined to avoid the second-class life of my father’s profession. I meant no disrespect to Pap and the life of a club professional. Back then a club professional’s status was so different from that of today’s professional, and I knew in my gut there was no way I could put up with the things I’d seen Pap put up with over the years.

Golf would be my ticket
somewhere
, I told myself, I just couldn’t say where it would lead me. But life at Wake for the
time being, even with the social restrictions, couldn’t have been better. After constructing the new grass greens on the school golf course, I was free to play as much as I wanted and sometimes even invited my dates to be human targets on the greens. God only knows why they agreed to do it; perhaps I had more charm than I realized in those days, except with a certain academic dean who took to summoning me to his office for friendly chats about my casual academic performance.

During my sophomore year, I captured a second straight Southern Conference championship and became the medalist (or low qualifier) at the National Intercollegiate finals at Ames, Iowa, where I lost to Tom Veech of Notre Dame in the semifinals. Harvie Ward beat Veech in the final match to take the NCAA championship. I remember being furious with myself because I’d never lost a match to Harvie Ward, and it would have been great to have the two of us, both representing the Southern Conference, vying for the national collegiate championship. It wasn’t to be, though.

What was to be, however, in the summer break between my sophomore and junior years, was another West Penn Amateur title—I beat Jack Benson over a difficult Oakmont Country Club course, my first real glimpse of the famous course set up to tournament specs—and once again I was a semifinalist at the North and South Amateur. In midsummer, I managed to make it to the third round of the U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester before being eliminated with surgical precision, 4 and 3, by Crawford Rainwater of Pensacola, Florida. Two steps closer to the big prize, but ultimately another disappointment and a new resolution.

My junior year at Wake was, in retrospect, maybe the most fun of all my college years. There were plenty of parties and plenty of pretty girls and lots of laughs and more competitive golf than I suppose I’d ever played in my life. Bud and I grew
socially more confident but were still basically inseparable, always ready to drop everything at the chance to beat each other on the golf course. This had been our standard operating procedure since our very first week at Wake Forest, when we managed to cajole a couple of coaches into taking us over to the Carolina Country Club in Raleigh for a four-ball match. Bud shot 67 that day, and I beat him by a stroke—on a course neither one of us had seen before. That set the tone for our matches, which always had something riding on them—at least the drinks afterward. My grades still weren’t great, but, once again, thanks to Bud Worsham, I was holding my own, and with Johnny Johnston’s return as the golf coach, I found a true friend and confidant for life.

On weekends, I sometimes went to Bud’s home in Maryland, or he went to Latrobe with me. My younger brother, Jerry, and little sister Sandy (my parents had another set of children almost twenty years after Cheech and me) fell in love with Bud, and we both grew close to each other’s families. It was while we were hitchhiking back to school one weekend with our golf bags in tow that we met George Fazio. We had our thumbs out on U.S. 1 south of Washington when a big Cadillac pulled over. I recognized Fazio instantly, but he didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat until Bud told him who his older brother was. We told him we were headed back to college at Wake Forest, and he told us to hop in, asking if either of us was old enough to drive a car. I said yes. He promptly told me to drive, climbed in the back, issued firm orders to shake him awake when we got to North Carolina, then fell into a deep, noisy sleep. That was the first Cadillac I ever drove. I remember being impressed by that car, its big purring engine and nice interior, a true symbol of American success.

We failed to win the Southern Conference team title, but my game had never been sharper and I captured the Southern
Intercollegiate championship and once again was low qualifier at the NCAA finals, firing a record pair of 68s at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a tournament that featured Billy Maxwell, Don January, and Jack and Jimmy Vickers, gunning for All-American fame. Unfortunately, as often happens after a record-setting performance, I let down my guard and played poorly in the semifinal round, and was beaten by a dark horse named Eli Bariteau of San Jose State. Being sent home early really hurt, but it only made me buckle down and practice that much harder. Later that summer the intense work paid dividends; I won my third West Penn Amateur and the Greensburg Invitational, tune-ups for what I hoped would be my big breakthrough at the U.S. Amateur at Minneapolis Country Club in Minnesota.

Frank Stranahan of Toledo, Ohio, was my opponent in that first round. To be honest, this sort of pleased and worried me. Stranny, as I called him, was a pretty good friend against whom I’d competed several times in our amateur playing careers, most notably at the North and South Amateur in both ’48 and ’49. Curiously, in 1948, Harvie Ward beat me in the semifinals and Stranny in the championship match; the next year, I played Stranny in the semis and he really cleaned my clock, something like 11 and 9 over a thirty-six-hole match, before going on to whip Harvie. The way I figured it, I was a good-luck charm for both of them.

Maybe this time Lady Luck would be in my corner for a change and my third trip to the Amateur would prove the charm.

My other nickname for Stranny was Muss. He was not only a tenacious competitor but also something of a weight-lifting addict and health nut to boot, a classy fellow whose father was chairman of Champion Spark Plugs in Toledo. Early on I learned never to take our matches lightly, because Muss was a steady player who was capable of going on a sudden birdie
binge like nobody you’ve ever seen—as he did at Minneapolis, beating me once more, 4 and 3, to knock me out of the National Amateur yet again. If I had to lose in the first round, I suppose it helped slightly that it had been a friend who beat me.

On the other hand, I was somewhat bitter that I’d missed another golden opportunity. But as Pap had trained me to do, I put on a good face and was a perfect gentleman about the loss, smiling and graciously congratulating Stranny and wishing him the best of luck. I really meant it—he deserved to win and dearly wanted the National Amateur title for himself and his family. Inside, however, I was seething mad at myself for having blown my chance to capture the prize I wanted more than anything else at that time in golf.

A
great deal of emotion and high expectation surrounded Wake’s homecoming football game of 1950. We were playing Carolina on our turf, and Carolina was the dominant pigskin power in the conference at that time. Wake, as I recall, had merely a so-so year. But with all those Baptists at home in the stands praying for an upset, it stood to reason that something big just might happen. Incidentally, the story that Peahead Walker had attempted to recruit me for the football team is true. Like Frank Stranahan, I was physically stronger than most golfers and pretty agile. I loved watching and playing football, but by that point had accepted Pap’s belief that it was foolish to play a game in which I could easily be injured and jeopardize my golf career.