A Golfer's Life (33 page)

Many have said that without my suggestion and Bob Drum’s publicizing it, there would have been no such thing
as a modern Grand Slam. Including the PGA as part of the Grand Slam certainly increased its importance in the eyes of many, and it was further enhanced by my declared objective of winning the Grand Slam—or at least the American equivalent of it, all three major titles on our shores. While I can’t offer absolute proof of that assertion, I am certain of this. In a move aimed at trying to increase gate receipts and capitalize on the potential windfall of television profits, in 1958, the first year I played in the event—at the Llanerch Country Club outside Philadelphia—the PGA decided to switch from its traditional match-play format to medal play. Following that move, the PGA Championship slipped a notch in terms of the prestige it enjoyed among some players and many in the media. To some, the once-great PGA Championship suddenly seemed like just another seventy-two-hole medal-play tournament, albeit an awfully important one, and with all due respect to my good friend Dow Finsterwald, who won that year, I did agree with those who thought it wasn’t a good idea to change the format.

From the beginning, despite my growing differences with the sponsoring organization, I believed in my heart that the PGA Championship was a vitally important cog in the machinery of major-league golf. Once I became eligible to participate in the event and began accumulating points toward the Ryder Cup, I really did try my best to win that championship.

My first good chance came at Firestone Country Club in 1960. Just back from the disappointment of not winning the British Open at St. Andrews, I’d made up my mind to go all out for the
American
Grand Slam and was nicely in contention through the 15th hole of the Saturday round. At the famous and supposedly unreachable 625-yard par-5 16th, I pushed my second shot to the right and found myself blocked by trees. Spotting a gap through them, I decided to go for the
green, nicked a branch, and my ball dropped into a hazard ditch. A penalty stroke and poor pitch followed, and I finished the hole with a triple-bogey 8—a score that effectively knocked me out of contention.

The next year, at Olympia Fields outside Chicago, Jerry Barber holed three monster putts in a row to catch Don January (he beat him in the subsequent playoff), while I scored better every round to finish in fifth place. Not quite where I wanted to be, but at least I was creeping closer to the top of the leader board.

In 1964, the championship was in Jack Nicklaus’s backyard, Columbus Country Club, and Jack and I both responded to the occasion by playing ourselves into a tie for second place behind Bobby Nichols, who pulled off some of the most astonishing recovery shots I’ve ever witnessed. Come to think of it, I made a few impressive saves myself, including a birdie from the woods on 18 to tie Jack for second. My rounds of 68-68-69-69 made me the first player in PGA Championship history to shoot four rounds in the sixties and not win. Close but no cigar. Tough to swallow, that one.

Two years later, Jack and I won the second PGA Team Championship held at Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. That was the first of three such titles we would capture in the next five years (we won twice at Laurel Valley, in 1970 and 1971). Those victories, along with our four Canada/World Cup team wins in 1963, 1964, 1966, and 1967, prompted that memorable cry in the press of “Break up the Yankees,” alluding to the reigning baseball dynasty of the time. Those team matches with Jack were really fun, I must say, in part because, for a change, I had the biggest threat in golf on my team. Perhaps we were golf’s team match dynasty. All I know is that Jack and I are proud of the team record we assembled during those years.

I also know that I wasn’t a factor again in the PGA Championship
until 1968, at Pecan Valley in San Antonio, Texas, a place so blessedly hot that players had to guard against heat exhaustion. As you would expect of southern Texas in July, the temperature made you feel like you were stepping into a Latrobe blast furnace, but surprisingly the greens were somewhat slow and therefore to my liking. Also, I liked playing in the heat. So, while the rest of the field wilted and had trouble breaking par, I got off to a respectable start with an opening-round 72 and got better by three strokes the next day. Standing on the tee at the 72nd hole, I was a mere stroke off the lead, held by Julius Boros, who was playing in the group just behind me.

I overcooked my swing and hooked the drive into some snarly grass near television transmission cables. Watching me pull the 3-wood to go for the green, Doc Giffin, who was on the scene, later said he felt the way Tip Anderson felt at Birkdale when I took out that 6-iron. In other words, he couldn’t believe I was going to try as risky a low-percentage shot as that. A fairway wood from the deep rough is one of the toughest shots in the game, but the way I figured it, I might never get this close to the prize that had eluded me most, so I pulled out the wood and went for it.

I hit what was probably the finest wood shot of my career. The ball landed on the green and checked up eight feet above the cup. If I made that short putt, I would be tied with Boros, who was then standing on the tee. The ball went straight at the hole but curled off and rolled several inches past. I slumped over in despair. Boros made it an interesting finish, though, dramatic to the bittersweet end. Unable to reach the green in two, he made a superb pitch to get up and down in two, to win the championship. I finished in second place, tied with Bob Charles. A bridesmaid once again, I mentally kicked myself for having missed that putt.

Exactly two years later, at Southern Hills in Tulsa, another short-game master, Dave Stockton, worked his wedge magic on the closing holes to figuratively snatch another PGA Championship from my grasp. During the final round, at the dangerous 13th, a par 5 that had been converted into a par 4 for the tournament, Dave plunked his second shot into the pond, while I put mine on the green with an excellent chance at birdie. I was four down at that point, but it appeared there was going to be at least a two-, perhaps even a three-shot swing.

I watched as Dave dropped a ball by the hazard and made a sensational clutch recovery pitch, very nearly holing his wedge shot. He tapped in for a bogey, and I missed the birdie. The give-back was just a shot, but the disappointment I experienced at not taking fuller advantage of the opportunity was like a punch in the gut. Whatever momentum had been building suddenly vanished. Dave won by two over Bob Murphy and me. Another PGA
almost
.

In retrospect, for a variety of reasons, perhaps the one loss that hurt the most was the PGA Championship I hosted at Laurel Valley in 1965. In a sense, I suppose I’d rescued the PGA from the horns of a serious dilemma. Across the board in American sports, times were changing, but the PGA was reluctant to change with them. In professional baseball and football, for example, racial barriers had fallen, and blacks and other minority players were finally being accorded the respect and paid the money they deserved. Given certain antiquated policies of the PGA, though, it was inevitable that the organization would run into trouble with politicians. With the PGA set to take place the summer of 1965 at San Francisco Golf Club, the attorney general of California used the golf organization’s exclusionary “Caucasian only” policy to bar the tournament from his state.

I’ve been criticized by some who contend I didn’t use whatever clout I may have had at the time (which I personally don’t think was all that much—at least with PGA members) to publicly oppose the discriminatory policies and encourage minority participation in the game. I suppose by some yardstick measurements, that’s true—if by that my critics mean I never called a press conference to confront such issues or even challenge the organization’s policies in conversations with reporters.

On the other hand, given the way I was raised by Pap, to respect any man regardless of his skin color or nationality—to say nothing of my irritation over the infamous “cripples” clause—it wasn’t in my nature to openly attack the organization or lead the crusade for change, actions that probably would have made me a lot of enemies in an organization that had done so many good things for the game of golf and was otherwise honorable and well intentioned. I, and many others, wanted to see the PGA change, to have its racial policies, and other policies, evolve with the times, but I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Consequently, at the height of this first racial flare-up, I saw an opportunity to be of service to golf and the PGA of America by suggesting that the PGA move the championship to Laurel Valley, which was done. Unfortunately, as black golf stars like Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder can tell you, though, it really took many more years—decades, in fact—and a lot of quiet soul-searching and campaigning from within to finally get rid of the exclusionary language that I believe hurt the PGA’s prestige. Inevitably, it took another nasty racial flare-up—this time after Hall Thompson made his controversial remarks at Shoal Creek in Alabama in 1990. The flood of negative publicity and public outrage that followed the incident prompted a thorough self-examination by the PGA of America and the
PGA Tour and ultimately resulted in the establishment of new anti-discrimination policies that, I believe, have finally made professional golf a tent large enough to accommodate everybody.

As for staging the event at Laurel Valley in 1965, I wanted it to be picture perfect in every way, so, experiencing a kind of large-scale host anxiety, I worked and worried myself into a frantic state of mind, checking and rechecking on every detail in the days leading up to the championship. Perhaps I should have gone fishing in one of the nearby trout streams instead, because it was quickly clear from my play that I had invested far too many hopes and high expectations in the tournament. What a perfect setting Laurel Valley would have been to get the PGA monkey off my back once and for all.

The way I played the first hole of the championship nicely sums up my fate there that week. My 7-iron approach shot missed the green left and wound up just short of a small, temporary footbridge, which was directly in my line to the putting surface. Almost before anybody noticed what was happening, a gallery marshal with the wonderfully ironic name of Miles Span removed the bridge’s railing. I pitched up and salvaged par, but I was informed a few holes later by an official that, by permitting improvement of my line of play, I’d violated a rule. I was assessed two penalty strokes. The wind went right out of my sails.

I finished with an even-par 72 but never summoned the focus to take my scoring any lower in the three succeeding rounds. I completed the tournament with 294, thirty-three places behind the winner, my good and gentle friend Dave Marr, who made it nerve-racking by
not
going for the green in regulation on the 72nd hole. He made a great long pitch to save par and win.

I gave Dave a good chewing-out for that strategy. Then I grinned and slapped him on the back and congratulated him
on winning his first major championship. If I couldn’t win it that year, I was very pleased Dave Marr had.

After the “near miss” at Southern Hills in 1970, I never really challenged in the tournament again, though in 1989 Jack Nicklaus and I did briefly give the boys in the press tent something to write home about. At Kemper Lakes outside Chicago, Jack and I both opened with 68s, and at one point near the finish of the opening round I actually held the lead and was cruising toward a 66. I was later informed that when word spread what Jack and I were up to on the golf course, something rare happened: the press tent virtually cleared out. Nearly all the scribes, including my crusty old friend Dan Jenkins (who rarely ventured onto a course unless a national emergency had been declared) came out to see for themselves what some hoped would be a reprise of the old Nicklaus-Palmer magic. Unfortunately, I treated them to a pair of untimely bogeys and finished with 68.

Despite ending the round that way, it felt great to briefly be atop the heap, and Jack agreed with me. And though I was one month shy of my sixtieth birthday, it was almost like the good old days. Jack and I had managed to turn back the calender a few years, and I couldn’t recall the last time I’d made five consecutive birdies in competition. That really got the gallery buzzing, and it raised goose bumps on my own arms. Curiously, there was another champion lurking at the top of the leader board, quietly stalking the one major golf title that has forever eluded him, as well.

Tom Watson didn’t take home the Wanamaker Trophy that year, and neither did I. With a 74 in the second round and a free fall to an awful 81 in the third, I finished in a disappointing tie for sixty-third place.

But at least I’d briefly felt that old current of excitement that comes with being in the chase, and perhaps that set the stage for my final appearance in the championship, in 1994.
There comes a point when you have to say goodbye, and that point came for me, fittingly enough, at Southern Hills in August of that year. In an emotional setting that was similar in scope to my farewell to the Open at Oakmont just weeks before, I could barely get around the course in one piece—and barely get the words out afterward to express what the tournament and my long association with the PGA of America meant to me. I played poorly and missed the cut, to nobody’s surprise, but I thanked the organization from the bottom of my heart for being such an important part of my life. As you well know, you can’t have a long-term relationship with anyone or anything without some conflict along the way.

A
nd as I finished my final competitive round in the PGA Championship, I was reminded of the long and sometimes rocky road I’d traveled with the PGA of America.

All families have honorable internal disputes, and one of those conflicts helped to create the modern PGA Tour. Jack Nicklaus and I lent strong hands to the creation of the organization when a players’ revolt threatened to tear apart the PGA of America in the late 1960s.

Here’s my take on what happened:

As I’ve said, as early as the mid-fifties, top players like Ben Hogan and Sam Snead openly complained that it wasn’t in the best interests of professional golf for the PGA of America, essentially an organization for the game’s club and teaching professionals, to be running golf tournaments with an iron hand, making schedules, determining purses, and setting the rules by which players who made their incomes from playing in those tournaments simply had to abide.