A Golfer's Life (28 page)

Maybe the thing I hated and feared most was the feeling that people might feel sorry for me. I still had the desire to show them what I could do, and I knew I still had the shots to do it. But as I admitted to several close confidants beginning in about 1965, every time I’d get close to a major prize, my hands would begin to shake, and for a moment or two, when it counted most, the demons of doubt would whisper in my ear and I honestly wondered if I could win again.

As a result, 1965 was a genuine torment from beginning to end. At age thirty-six, for the first time, I had major body pains to go with the mental anguish, particularly in my shoulder, where I was plagued by bursitis most of the year. I no longer smoked on the golf course, but I ate more to try to fill the nervous void. As a result, I put on extra weight that made me feel sluggish, out of sorts, slower, more cautious—not old, exactly, but no longer young, either. I know enough star NFL quarterbacks to know that this was how they felt when they realized it was almost time to hang up the spikes.

By year’s end, I’d managed to win only one tournament in nineteen months, the Tournament of Champions, and for the first time after five consecutive years of ranking first or second on the Tour earnings list, I’d fallen to tenth place—almost $90,000 behind Jack Nicklaus.

*  *  *

I
’ve often said, as others have before me, that the true test of a champion comes not when he’s winning, but when the chips are down and he can’t seem to find his way.

After my steep fall-off in 1965, Winnie and I did some serious soul-searching about where I was headed in my playing career. I know she felt one factor contributing to my decline was the growing length of the PGA season, which now stretched from Los Angeles the first week of the year to November and even early December. The Tour I had joined in 1955 was pretty much a six-month affair, but now, thanks to lucrative exhibition matches and a host of growing “unofficial” events and foreign tournaments anxious to capitalize on golf’s booming popularity, it was possible to play golf without a significant break almost from Christmas to Christmas.

During my peak performance years, I’d always relished the chance to get away from the Tour and go home and do nothing but putter around the house and my workshop, play with the girls and go hunting with Pap, have dinner with friends, and be a nuisance underfoot to Winnie as she prepared the house for the holidays. One thing that was clearly missing now, as she pointed out, was that month of rest I once customarily took after Thanksgiving.

I was reluctant to admit she was right—but, as usual, she was right. We agreed after that disappointing “slump” year of 1965 finally came to an end that I needed to get back to the basics of family life, slowing down to enjoy it more.

I canceled a lot of engagements and took the rest of the year off to be with Winnie and the girls. It was almost like the old days, and the rest clearly did me good.

I
n the first tournament of the new year, 1966, the Los Angeles Open, I birdied seven holes in a row en route to a third-round
62, matching my career low and producing a three-shot victory over Miller Barber and Paul Harney.

I kept telling reporters and just about anybody else who would listen that my only focus for the year was winning golf tournaments, and in successive weeks, falling briefly off the cigarette wagon and puffing the odd coffin nail here or there on the sly, I placed second in the Crosby, third at the Lucky International, and lost in a playoff to Doug Sanders at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.

My Army was clearly pleased that “Arnie was back,” and I wasn’t at all disappointed myself.

After sixty-two holes at the Masters, I was tied for the lead, but I faltered and faded to fourth. Still, heading into the 66th U.S. Open at San Francisco’s Olympic Club, our destination when Winnie and I had made our first big trip west more than a decade before as newlyweds, I was pleased that I’d made one of my best starts ever.

This time we stayed with our friends Ed and Rita Douglas, in their lovely home not far from the University of San Francisco. The Douglases had become close friends of ours over the years, and it was Ed, a regional manager for Pennzoil, who helped create a strong commercial affiliation that I enjoy to this day.

I’d made a few changes to my swing, learning to hit the ball with a slight fade that would fit Olympic’s predominantly left-to-right features. It seemed to work pretty well, though I completed my first round in 71 despite some typically shaky putting on those billiard-table-fast greens. The first-round magic belonged to Al Mengert, a part-time tour professional from Washington State, who shot 67.

The next day I caught fire, and if I hadn’t missed putts of less than four feet on each of the closing two holes, I would have matched the Open record of 64. As it was, my round of 66 and 137 total left me in a tie for first with Bill Casper.

Bill—as I preferred to call him instead of Billy—was a bit rejuvenated himself, having shed a lot of weight on a strange diet that reportedly involved buffalo and bear meats. The story goes—and I’ve never asked Bill about this, so who knows if it’s true—that one morning before his round he ate swordfish and tomatoes, which would be enough to give me serious stomach distress. But the point is, Casper was leaner and meaner and had a more serious look in his eye than most of us had ever seen before. He was also one of the best short-game players who ever walked on an Open course, especially in the putting department.

For reasons both commercial and logistical in nature, the USGA’s executive committee had decided to abandon “Open Saturday’s” double rounds. Starting with Olympic, the tournament would conclude on a fourth day, a move most players applauded.

My third round wasn’t particularly sensational, a steady 70, but it allowed me to open up a three-shot bulge over the slimmed-down Bill Casper, who completed his round with 73.

I felt the old adrenaline pumping, and I was once again attacking the golf course as I had in my younger days. Going into that final round, my feeling was that Olympic’s front nine was more difficult than the back nine. If I could post a low score there on Sunday, I could play home with the confidence that it would take an extraordinary feat of shotmaking—or at least a spectacular collapse on my part—for somebody to catch me.

Everything just seemed to click. The shots were solid, the putts dropped. I’d posted a 32 by the turn and opened a commanding seven-stroke lead over Casper. To be perfectly honest, though, I wasn’t thinking too much about Bill and what he might have to do in order to catch me. He was a steady player and sensational putter, but frankly not the sort who was known for last-minute heroics. The guy I had my eye on,
and feared most, quite honestly, was a couple of strokes back of him: Jack Nicklaus.

How do you explain what happened over the next ninety minutes or so? I’ve spent nearly three decades attempting to do just that—explain to myself and to a lot of other sympathetic people the rhyme and reason of what transpired.

The simplest explanation is that, believing I had the Open already won, I quit playing Bill and Jack and started playing Ben Hogan’s old 1948 Open record of 276. I’d done the same thing at Augusta when I almost gave away the Masters while chasing his mark there. I knew that if I could just finish the back nine in 36, a stroke above par, the new record of 275 would belong to Arnold Daniel Palmer.

In retrospect, it was the biggest mental error of my career.

In daring to think about breaking Hogan’s record, I violated the very rule Pap had spent all those years drilling into my head—never quit, never look up, and, most of all, never lose focus until you’ve completely taken care of business. As we started together down the tenth fairway, Bill looked at me and made what sounded an awful lot like a concession speech. No doubt feeling Jack in hot pursuit, he reflected: “I’m going to have to go just to get second.”

“Don’t worry, Bill,” I replied, uttering the words I was doomed to have to eat. “You’ll finish second.”

The nightmare began at that same hole, a bogey for Palmer at ten. Bill parred. Advantage Casper.

After that, like some ghostly newsreel playing in my head, I recall it going like this: I birdie at the 12th, but so does Bill. I remind myself that I’m still six ahead of him with six holes to play—no place to panic. At the par-3 13th, I miss the green with my tee shot and settle for bogey four. Maddening, but not fatal. We move to 14, where we both make pars; I’m still five up, but thanks to that bogey I now must par my way home to beat Hogan’s old mark.

Fifteen is another par 3. The pin is tucked in the right-hand corner behind a bunker. Instead of playing safe, I decide this is the moment to put the tournament on ice. I attempt the perfect shot and go straight at the flag, watch my ball catch the edge of the green and tumble into the bunker. Another bogey. Then Casper, who has played safely to the middle of the green, thirty-five feet from the pin—I remember being annoyed by his strategy, wondering what he had to lose by
not
going for the pin—smoothly rolls home another birdie putt.

Thoughts of Ben Hogan and his record instantly vanish from my mind, replaced by the first rising vapors of genuine alarm. For the first time, it dawns on me that Bill Casper is the real threat here, not Ben Hogan. My lead has dwindled to three. We walk on to the 16th, the big par 5, 604 yards with a sweeping right-to-left curve that fits my natural ball flight. Most golfers would settle for two safe hits and a careful pitch to the putting surface, but all I can think at this point is how irritated I am that Casper has been “playing safe” and is catching up on me. I tell myself there is no way I can allow that to happen. There is
no way
I’m going to allow him to beat me by playing safe. I decide I will win or lose exactly the way I’ve won or lost every golf tournament I’ve ever played.

The long draw is my bread-and-butter shot, but either nerves or perhaps the fact that I’ve been hitting fades all week finally takes a toll. An untimely duck hook sends the ball off a tree into the deep left rough. I compound the situation by trying to slash a 3-iron out of the heavy rough. The ball squirts across the fairway, advancing less than a hundred yards. It stops once more in the heavy grass, leaving me no chance to reach the putting surface on my third. Now I still have over three hundred yards of fairway to negotiate and only three shots left for par. I chop the ball back to the fairway with my wedge and drill a 3-wood into the greenside
bunker. You don’t want to know what’s going on in my mind here. It feels as if a volcano is about to erupt in my head. I blast out of the bunker and am fortunate to make no worse than six. Bill, playing impeccably safe golf again, scores his second consecutive birdie.

I have now lost four strokes on two holes, and my lead is one.

On 17, the hardest hole at Olympic, 435 yards uphill to a small green on the shoulder of the hill, I hook my drive into the long grass again, miss the green on my approach, but finally make a decent chip that leaves me ten feet for par. My putt just grazes the right edge of the hole. Bill, meanwhile, makes his par 4 and we are suddenly tied for the lead at the 66th U.S. Open.

At 18, Bill plays quickly, splitting the fairway with his drive. I tell myself there is still no reason to panic but certainly a need to get the ball into the short grass. I choose a 1-iron for accuracy but am so wound up I even pull that shot. I stare after the ball with a slumping heart as it scampers into the heavy left rough and disappears from my sight. What I wouldn’t have given for an L&M cigarette about then.

Walking down the fairway, shaken to the core, I doubt if I have ever felt as alone or as devastated on a golf course. I know what a train wreck the world is witnessing, but I tell myself that I am
still
in the thick of it. I can glance at faces in the gallery and see their shock and grief, too. People call out reassuringly, and I don’t even know if I acknowledge them. Perhaps I scan the crowd for Winnie, because her emotional thermometer is always set on seventy-two degrees and it never fails to calm me to see her. (Mark McCormack, on the other hand, was often such a visible nervous wreck, it made me feel nervous just to look at him—he often left the course at such moments to make business calls, for both our sakes.)

I try to relax and remember my father’s lessons about keeping my head and body still, making a slow backswing and solid contact. All I need is one good shot. This one looks almost impossible, but I must somehow get it on the putting surface. I know Bill will get his shot on the green, and if I want any hope of making a playoff, I simply must have a par.

I decide on a wedge and set up over the ball, then hit it hard, slashing it out of the long grass. An instant later, still leaning over, I glance up to see where it is going. I watch the ball fly extremely high and appear to settle somewhere in back of the dangerously tiny green. The gallery there lets out a roar, and I know I’ve still got at least a chance to save par and halve the hole.

On the green, I face a difficult thirty-footer downhill to the cup across the lightning-fast putting surface. After a moment or two sizing up the situation, I stroke the putt and slightly misjudge the line a bit, leaving myself as tough a side-hill six-footer as I’ve ever faced to salvage par. Under the rule then in effect, I am forced to putt out first, which I do, then I step back to wait and see if Bill can beat my four. He misses his birdie attempt and we both finish with 278.

As Bill and I shake hands, all I really feel is a sense of deep relief and perhaps a bit of disbelief at what has just happened. My anger at myself will come later. In time, I realized I knew what Hogan must have felt like when Fleck caught him in exactly the same spot in 1955, forcing a playoff at the final hole of the Open—a tournament the greatest player in the game at that moment felt confident he’d won. My own confidence now shaken, I sign my card and walk slowly to the press tent, where a hundred unanswerable questions await. My friends in the press corps all look a little embarrassed to have to ask them. I can’t wait to get to Ed and Rita’s place for a drink.