Men in Green (34 page)

Our night on the Elie links in 2010 was a prime example of a busman's holiday, and so was a trip we made out to Long Island to watch the Walker Cup three years later. The Walker Cup is a competition in which a team of the best American amateurs plays a team of the best amateurs from Great Britain and Ireland. The first Walker Cup was held in 1922 at the National Golf Links of America on the East End of Long Island. In 2013 the Walker Cup returned to the National Golf Links for the second time. There was no paid parking, no security check, no gallery ropes. You could just wander the property and enjoy the golf, the course, and the people on it. Or not. Leaving the course after the Saturday round, Mike and I played Twenty Questions. To start the game, Mike offered this hint: “On the course today, I saw the biggest douchebag in all of golf.” I know it's been a while since you've heard Mike in full. I didn't want him to fade out quietly here.

The National was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald with a major assist from a Long Island engineer named Seth Raynor, who designed the course I grew up playing in Bellport. NGL and Bellport are about thirty miles apart. They are both old-timey links built on brackish bays, and they both offer more than a nod to the motherland. As a young golfer I took many of my cues from Scotland, from Bellport, and, in a less direct way, from the National. Not the National as it actually was, because I surely didn't know it. But the National as I imagined it, circa 1979, as a course populated (sparsely) by well-mannered gents who accepted life's bounces, good and bad. I extrapolated wildly from there. I was a dreaming teenager.

On the Sunday morning of the Walker Cup, Mike and I played Bellport. When I go to Bellport, it all comes flooding back: putting for quarters with Stuart Feldman; caddying for my high school principal and holding his pipe between shots; playing through dark on summer nights with Larry Lodi. If I were asked which course I would play if I were down to my last game, there would be no debate. To join Bellport as a kid, all I had to do was fill out a piece of paper and hand the clerk in the village hall fifty dollars. I still have my junior-member Class E tag on my current bag, now woefully expired (good through June 1, 1980). But in my mind my membership has not lapsed and never will. Where would golf be without public courses? Where would I be?

On the Monday after the Walker Cup, I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in close to forty years, Don Greenlee, my gym teacher in eighth grade. Mr. Greenlee was a good golfer, and it occurred to him that his favorite sport should be offered at South Ocean Avenue Middle School, “even though Patchogue was not an affluent community,” he said. “So I filled out a requisitions form and ordered a bunch of five-irons, and I think the class you took, Mike, was the first one I ever taught.” I was Mike again.

The whole class, held in winter, was conducted inside on the basketball court. We hit plastic balls off plastic mats, aiming for the backboards. It was enough to get me hooked. Mr. Greenlee taught me how to hold a club. Years later, Ken Venturi complimented my grip.

Mr. Greenlee talked about trying to qualify for a few USGA events and winning a club championship at Spring Lake, a public course where our high school team practiced and played. Mike came with me, taking it all in. Mr. Greenlee was retired, and he and his wife divided their time between central Florida and Suffolk County. Mike was impressed by Mr. Greenlee's prudence, the care with which he had managed his life. Mr. Greenlee asked about my mother, who taught English at South Ocean Avenue for a number of years, and he remembered the day when Fred Couples came to Bellport for an exhibition, though he didn't go. “I wish I would have availed myself of that opportunity,” he said. He talked about the pleasure golf continued to give him. He looked remarkably unchanged, though I noted that he no longer had a mustache. Turns out he had shaved it off thirty years earlier.

Near the end of our visit, Mike said to Mr. Greenlee, “You taught Mike well.” What a nice thing for Mike to say, both for my benefit and for the man who changed my life.
Better living through golf
. I know the concept. Mr. Greenlee does, too. As does Mike Donald, Golf Ball, Arnold Palmer, Chuck Will, Fred Couples, Jaime Diaz, Billy Harmon, Randy Erskine—you know the list. Maybe you're on it.

As we got up to leave Mr. Greenlee in his tidy home, it occurred to me that I had arrived empty-handed. At the British Open a couple of months earlier, during registration in the press tent, each reporter was given a tiny metal pin, a replica of the Claret Jug that the Open winner receives. I immediately took mine out of its tiny square plastic bag and attached it to the collar of the white golf shirt I had on that day. I never wear such things, but that's what I did. The pin stayed put through many subsequent washings, and I was wearing that white shirt with the pin that day at Mr. Greenlee's house. In the three years I had played varsity golf at Patchogue-Medford High School, we were given something similar, along with our varsity letters: a little gold-colored pin in the shape of a golf bag. Christine has one of them on a coat.

“I wish I had something better to give you,” I said to Mr. Greenlee as I handed him the pin. “Thank you for all that you did for me.”

His eyes welled.

•  •  •

I had seen Arnold a half-dozen times since the first stop on our tour, when Mike and I saw him in Latrobe. Once, sitting with Arnold in his heavy leather-and-wood Bay Hill office, I asked him if he was one to dream.

“Oh, I dream all the time,” Arnold said.

“Really,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

He then told me about a recent dream he'd had in which he could not get a business matter to work out no matter what he tried.

I asked if golf appeared in his dreams.

“All the time,” Arnold said. “I had one last night where I made a twenty-footer to take the lead, but I didn't get to the back nine. I'd like to know how that one ends. I never get to the eighteenth in any of my golf dreams. It's never a specific tournament or course. I never recognize the other players.”

He seemed disappointed by that last revelation, as if he'd like another shot at the old gang.

I asked Arnold how often he dreamed of golf. “About a quarter of the time,” he said.

Arnold is a numbers-oriented man, and he then did a little round-number accounting. Golf accounted for a quarter of his dreams. Business issues, he said, occupied another quarter, and flying a third quarter. I asked about the remaining quarter.

“Other,” Arnold said.

Arnold was leaving a whole category for himself. Who could blame him?
The secret dreams of Arnold Palmer
. I'm going to take a wild guess that Arnold wanted what Ken wanted, what Mike wanted, what I wanted, what millions of men the world over want: to get the trophy and the girl. Is that asking too much? Arnold did it. He got both and never gloated about it. The opposite. He let us in.

One day at Bay Hill when Mike and I were visiting, Arnold introduced Mike to his daughter Amy and said, “Mike and I played the tour together.” Arnold has an astounding capacity to make people feel good. On that same day, Arnold called his wife and asked if she wanted to join him at lunch. Kit said, “Can I have fifteen minutes?” Arnold said, “Take as much time as you need.” Talk about your models of manly grace.

After lunch on a different day, I absentmindedly had my right forearm in the window of Arnold's SUV as he sat in the driver's seat with the window down. By way of good-bye, he placed his right hand in the middle of my forearm. I don't know how any one person could exude more warmth. It must be in his DNA.

In the end, after Jack, there was one more
final
final stop on
Farewell to Persimmon Tour '79
: Arnold in Latrobe. (You got to stop somewhere, right?) I drove from Philadelphia to Latrobe to see him. I made the drive wearing sandals, and when I arrived in Latrobe I was chagrined to discover that amid all my paraphernalia in the trunk of the Subaru I did not have a pair of real shoes. The only shoes back there were running shoes and a pair of white wing-tip golf shoes still wearing the dirt of their last game. I went to the men's room in the lobby of the SpringHill Suites, at 115 Arnold Palmer Drive, to clean them up.

A short while later, I was sitting with Arnold in his office. I was right beside him at his desk, and I noticed that he was looking in the general direction of my ankles.

“Arnold, are you looking at my shoes?”

“No,” Arnold said, “I'm looking at your socks!”

They had horizontal stripes and were semi-ridiculous. I took that opportunity to apologize for wearing golf shoes (with little rubber nubs on the soles) to his office.

“That's not a problem,” Arnold said. He picked up his right foot and pointed the bottom of his black leather shoe in my direction. He was wearing golf shoes himself, along with a schoolboy smile. It was like he was getting away with a spitball.
Golf shoes in the office!

I filled Arnold in on the legends Mike and I had seen: Sandy Tatum, Ken Venturi, Golf Ball, Chuck Will, Jack Nicklaus at the end. I told him about David Fay sending me the relevant page from the 1958 edition of the
Rules of Golf
and how it was clear that Arnold had proceeded within the rules on the twelfth green at Augusta on the Sunday of the '58 Masters. Arnold put his thumb in the air. I doubt I was telling him anything new.

In the rounds Mike and I had made, nobody made a stronger impression on me than Golf Ball, in his bed at the nursing home in Jackson. I was awed by his acceptance of his station in life and moved by the obvious pleasure he took in the memory of his tour years, when he was at-large. I asked Arnold if he was satisfied with his life. Arnold did not pause.

“
Noooooooo!
”

For one thing, he wasn't piloting his own airplane anymore. For another, he was playing tournament golf only in his dreams, and in those tournaments he never made it to the seventy-second hole. Age had crept into his body and robbed him of his best moves. He didn't like it.

In the big picture, yes, he had led a rich life. He continued to lead a rich life. He had accomplished so much, in golf and in business. He had married twice and both times well. He had loving relationships with his two daughters. He had true friends and great wealth that did not trap him. He had a good appetite. His older grandson was trying to play his way to the tour and getting closer. But
satisfied
with his life, as a day-to-day proposition? The truthful answer was no.

I told Arnold about seeing Conni Venturi, about her health issues and how she lived by herself in a trailer park in Napa. Arnold shook his head with a certain sorrow. “Wasn't Ken paying her?” Arnold asked.

I said that they had been through the alimony wars, but those payments had ended a long time ago.

“How did she support herself?” Arnold asked.

I told him about her various jobs, her movie-star dreams as a girl, and her devotion to local theater as an older woman.

Arnold asked if Conni had ever remarried and seemed surprised to learn that she had not. He remembered her two sons.

“I always thought she was great,” Arnold said. “Just . . .
great
.”

Arnold was eighty-four, with health challenges of his own. It had been sixty years since he had won his U.S. Amateur on a week off from selling paint. Mike and I were lucky we saw Arnold the day we did, when he relived for us, chapter and verse, those fast weeks when he went from amateur to professional, and from bachelor to married man.

I gave Arnold the pink envelope from Conni, with her handwriting in black ink on its face. It had been burning a hole on my desk at home.

Arnold held the envelope up to eye level, looked at it, gave it a little shake, slid open the top drawer of his desk, and dropped it in.

MICHAEL BAMBERGER
was born in Patchogue, New York, in 1960. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha's)
Vineyard Gazette
, later for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Since 1995 he has been a senior writer for
Sports Illustrated
. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Christine.

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