A Golfer's Life (15 page)

The trailer we found was a neat little rig shaped like a loaf of bread, nineteen feet long, with a small kitchen, small bedroom, and a
very
small bath. The key word here is
small
. The only thing that wasn’t particularly small about it was the price. To afford it, we had to phone my father and—even more difficult—Shube Walzer and ask to borrow $500 from each. Pap readily agreed, and I was surprised by Shube’s willingness to chip in on the trailer. Perhaps the ice was beginning to thaw after all.

Speaking of ice, our first morning in that little love nest on wheels turned out to be an adventure neither Winnie nor I will ever forget. After hooking up the trailer and provisioning it with homemaking supplies, we drove to a trailer park near the tournament site and set up housekeeping, both so proud of our little place-on-wheels we were about to pop. Later, at the tournament site, I invited a fellow professional and his wife over for breakfast. (By then my mother had given Winnie her crash cooking course, and Winnie could do a pretty fair breakfast.) Anyway, perhaps forgetting that we were parked in the desert in winter, I got up early and went to shower, only to find there was no water. It was so cold outside, I quickly discovered, the trailer’s hose line to the spigot was frozen solid. Well, I thought, no problem. I went back inside and heated some water in a pot and poured it on the frozen line. I must have done this half a dozen times, but the line remained frozen as a Popsicle. Finally, I lost my patience altogether and kicked the spigot in frustration. The head snapped off clean as a whistle and water spouted up like a baby geyser. “C’mon, Winnie. We’re going over to the club for breakfast!” I shouted to my bride. And that’s exactly what we did—leaving that gusher for the management to handle.

I finished tenth at Phoenix, and we moved on to Tucson
and then San Antonio, followed by Houston and Baton Rouge. My best finish in those initial tournaments was sixth place at San Antonio. What I remember most about that period of time, aside from wrestling with and cursing at that trailer, was practicing my rear end off before and after each round.

I seemed to live on the practice tee and putting greens, beating balls off the rock-hard ground from dawn till dusk. In those days, it was kind of a running joke that the trajectory of my tee shots was so low you could always tell when Arnold Palmer had been on the tee—the grass in front of it was scorched by the ball. It’s true a lot of my tee shots rarely got higher than twenty feet off the ground and did indeed occasionally ricochet off the turf. I could still outdrive almost anybody out there, but I knew I would need a broader range of shotmaking skills if I wanted to win the two tournaments that most interested me—the Masters and the U.S. Open.

Earlier in this account I talked about my father’s stern admonition that the quickest way to wind up back in Latrobe was to accept swing advice from other players or fall under the spell of teachers. I pretty much accepted his words as gospel, but I did receive help of a sort from a larger-than-life character named George Low.

George was the son of a famous Carnoustie golf teacher and a widely acknowledged putting genius whose professional career was marginal at best on these shores but who epitomized the kinds of characters who were still around the professional tour in those days. Like a figure out of a Damon Runyon tale, George was a charming rogue who lived off a small inheritance from his father and whatever he could make at the horse track, at cards, or from the big-money private matches he always seemed to be in the middle of somewhere. He was proud of his Scottish heritage and not opposed to making an easy buck and supposedly once dressed up in a kilt to play the “part” of the “Scottish” professional
in George S. May’s elaborate Tam O’Shanter productions. As I fondly recall, old George always had some kind of action going somewhere—a putting match he never lost, if nothing else. Anyway, though Tony Penna questioned whether my swing would keep me out on tour long, George had no doubt about my abilities whatsoever. He took a shine to me very early—perhaps because I was a professional’s son like him—and gave me the one putting lesson I ever had. It was short and sweet, as I’ll explain.

From the beginning, my putting stroke was also the subject of some conjecture on the parts of commentators and other professionals and observers. The way I hunched over the ball, knock-kneed and leaning, and gave the ball a firm, wristy rap that often sent it speeding ten feet past the hole seemed to trouble some people, who thought I should stand straighter, use less body English, and make a smoother stroke rather than the stab that sometimes crept into my putting technique. I rarely left a ball shy of the cup, figuring it was easier to make the comebacker than a putt that never reached the target to begin with.

I also learned early on from my own experimentation that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having “wristy action” in a putt if you’re able to keep the putter head square and the face on target, which I was able to do by standing very close to the ball, allowing my wrists to “hinge” back and forth. George was from the old school—the school where players taught themselves to play and used whatever worked for them—and gave me the most useful putting lesson I ever had. After watching me putt for a while, he took me aside and growled: “Listen to me, Arnie. There’s not a damn thing wrong with the way you putt. You putt great. Don’t ever let anybody fool with your putting stroke or you’ll be damned sorry.” George Low believed in the Gospel of Deke Palmer, and I was deeply grateful to have his support. It may or may
not have been George who gave me an interesting tip—namely, to dig the ends of my thumbs into the putter grip whenever I felt undue pressure or my stroke wasn’t up to snuff. I used that technique a few times in big tournaments when I really needed to get the ball in the hole or felt my stroke wasn’t working quite right.

Early on, George sort of adopted Winnie and me out on tour, and a few years later when Peg and Amy came along he served as a kind of Dutch uncle to the girls. Once, in Phoenix, when the girls were maybe four and six, “Uncle George” showed up at the hotel and insisted on baby-sitting while Winnie and I went out to dinner with some other folks. I remember how reluctant we were to leave the three of them, but George was nuts about the girls and vice versa, so we eventually gave in and went out to dinner. Much later we returned to find the girls still up and having the time of their lives. Uncle George had taught them how to play poker and, for all I know, roll dice. Peg and Amy adored him even before the time, some years later, when Uncle George showed up in Latrobe with bicycles for them, a gift from his “winnings.”

With George, a good rule was to not ask too many questions. I remember the time in Palm Springs he came to the house for dinner with a paper sack—what we used to call a “poke” back in Latrobe—in hand and asked Winnie and me to keep it for him “for a while.” But there was a catch: he also asked us not to look in it under any circumstances. We reluctantly agreed, but not long after he was gone curiosity got the better of us and we opened the bag to find it was full of money. We knew it had to be George’s winnings from the track. Winnie and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Later, when I handed the bag back to George, I told him there was no way Winnie and I could keep money for him and he ought to put it in a bank. George screwed up his face
and told me he didn’t trust banks. Especially not with $27,000. Winnie and I nearly fainted.

A
nyway, I practiced hard, a slave to the range before and after each round, and by the time of our arrival at St. Petersburg, Florida, the seventh week of the season, all that heavy-duty practicing had taken an unexpected toll on my body. One morning I woke to discover an excruciating pain in my upper torso; I could barely lift my arms above my shoulders without severe pain. I’ll admit to being a bit panicked—I had no idea what was wrong with me.

Some players were superstitious about how they practiced and played golf, and others—like Frank Stranahan, who passed along his weight-lifting and fanatical conditioning regimes to some extent to his protégé, a young man named Gary Player—performed elaborate pregame routines, always eating certain kinds of meals, abstaining from sex and alcohol, wearing certain types of clothes. You name it and they did it, all in an attempt to find the mental comfort zone where good golf is played. Still others carried four-leaf clovers or rabbit’s feet or lucky charms from their travels. Some openly prayed to God to let them win.

I’ve never been very superstitious, and my religious faith is more like my father’s, a strictly private matter between my maker and me. I did say prayers but never asked the Almighty to let me win a golf match or a tournament. My prayer was basically pretty simple and direct: Please let me stay healthy enough to compete. That was my biggest fear—that an injury or illness would keep me from being able to use my God-given physical abilities to win a golf tournament.

Now, in St. Petersburg, I faced the first test of my faith—this horrifying pain in my arms and shoulders. It had me
shaken up because I couldn’t imagine what the hell was wrong. I somehow got through my practice round, and that evening Winnie and I went out to dinner with professional Skip Alexander and his wife and their friends, a Dr. Needles and his wife. Dr. Needles was a heart specialist, and when I mentioned my problem to him he explained that I’d nearly beaten my shoulder and arm muscles to death, or at least to the point of extreme exhaustion, and that I would have to give them a rest or at least be very careful not to do serious or permanent injury.

He suggested I come to his office, adding that he had a brand-new “wonder drug” that might ease the inflammation. The next day, the aptly named Dr. Needles administered several injections of cortisone directly into my shoulder muscles. For several long minutes, I wondered if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Those injections hurt more than the sore muscles they were supposed to be helping. For a while it seemed as if the medicine might kill the patient, rather than cure him. The inflammation grew worse overnight, but somehow I gutted out the tournament, managing a 68 in the third round for a total of 284, good enough for seventeenth place. I joke about the episode now, whenever I feel a twitch of pain in those muscles after a round. But this experience gave me the first taste of what it’s like to play with serious pain, and I wouldn’t wish that fate on anybody.

As sore as I was, I suppose I must have been tempted to withdraw from the tournament. I did that five times that first year, pulled out of tournaments when things for one reason or another weren’t going to my liking. Today, when a professional pulls out of a tournament it’s considered big news—I suppose because the financial commitments are so large and the press corps so hungry for any whiff of controversy. In those days it wasn’t such a big deal. That’s not an excuse for quitting. Life
sometimes gets in the way of golf, and life invariably comes first. I’m not proud of the fact that I pulled out of those five tournaments, but on the other hand, if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have eventually learned the larger value of sticking with the game to the very end, regardless of the outcome. In time, as my name became better known to the galleries, I became aware of my obligation to stay in a tournament that wasn’t going particularly well, out of respect to the sponsors, to the galleries, and even to myself, who I was and where I’d come from—the son of a man who never abided the word “quit.”

Anyway, that week in St. Petersburg wasn’t exactly our best—on top of the acute pain in my shoulders we had trouble with our elderly Ford two-door. I remember taking the car to a service station to have the oil changed and the alignment checked out—there was a funny shimmy at sixty or seventy miles per hour—and the service attendant put her up on the lift and had barely begun examining the front tires when the left front wheel simply fell off. It startled us both, and the attendant remarked on the obvious—we were lucky that that wheel hadn’t snapped off while we were hauling a trailer at seventy miles an hour.

Speaking of the trailer, our little Phoenix love nest, its diminutive size was now too much—or, rather, too
little
—to bear. Winnie and I decided it had to go in favor of something larger and more accommodating. More phone calls to Latrobe and Coopersburg ensued, followed by two more loans of $500 from each of our families. A day or so later, we rolled into a trailer park in Florida pulling a new trailer that was twenty-six feet long.

This
was living, but my shoulders were still killing me. I went to Seminole Golf Club to play in a pro-am where I could pocket money and shot a dismal 87 and 86 on successive days. Luckily, by the start of the Miami Open a day or so
later, the pain had backed off enough to permit me to find my stroke again, and I recorded three rounds in the 60s, a respectable warm-up for my first appearance at the Masters.

I remember like it was yesterday the feeling as I drove up Magnolia Lane into Augusta National Golf Club for the first time. I’d never seen a place that looked so beautiful, so well manicured, and so purely devoted to golf, as beautiful as an antebellum estate, as quiet as a church. I remember turning to Winnie, who was as excited as I was by the sight of the place, and saying quietly, probably as much in awe as I’ve ever been: “This has got to be it, Babe …” I felt a powerful thrill and unexpected kinship with the place. Perhaps that’s partially because Augusta was built by Bob Jones, who was one of my childhood heroes, but also because the Masters, though still a relatively modest event in terms of money, was like a family gathering of the game’s greatest players, ruled with a firm, unbending hand by Clifford Roberts. They were all there—Jones, Sarazen, Snead, Nelson, Hogan. Though I’d met them all before, just seeing their names together on pairing sheets or chatting with each other on those perfect putting surfaces was an almost religious experience for me. Privately, I admitted to Winnie that it was like dying and going to heaven. I was there, of course, courtesy of my National Amateur title, and though I was rendered a bit agog by the lush surroundings and famous players, I was also surging with confidence. After weeks of playing courses on tour that were rock hard and in some cases in pretty woeful shape, coming to Augusta’s exquisitely manicured fairways and pristine greens was a royal treat I was anxious to experience. As it was not an official Tour event, I also stood to pocket some much-needed moola.