Authors: Arnold Palmer
John had a friend at another Cleveland manufacturing firm who had invented a golf course maintenance vehicle they believed would have immediate appeal to course superintendents everywhere. The vehicle was a nimble trailer-like device equipped with a special hydraulic lift that would permit a superintendent to move mowing equipment from one point to another point on the golf course much more quickly than the conventional manner of driving it, thereby saving time and money. It was a clever idea, the kind of machinery you see at every course these days, and it was the clincher.
John and his partner offered to pay me a flat salary of $50,000 a year plus expenses to play the PGA Tour as an amateur while representing them. The idea was that I’d go, say, to the Tour site in Phoenix (we talked about that being my first stop) and try to qualify for a spot in the field, then make a pitch to the course superintendent. As enticing schemes go, this one appeared to have no downside whatsoever. I’d get to play tournament golf without worrying about my income,
while selling this practical piece of machinery to a sympathetic buyer.
I told Bill Wehnes about the deal, and he was nearly heartbroken. He urged me to stick with him and even offered to double my salary, which still wouldn’t have come close to the fifty grand. We both knew it was a deal too good to refuse, and he reluctantly gave me his blessing. I called Pap to tell him about the deal, and he admitted it sounded pretty good. Pap still wasn’t convinced golf was much of a paying proposition, but the fifty grand got his respect.
I’ll never forget the morning I went to see John’s business partner at Warner Swazey, the manufacturing firm where he was plant manager, to finalize the deal. I got there early, only to be told I’d have to wait because my future employer wasn’t back yet from Florida. It seems he flew south every weekend to be with his wife and children.
I sat for a small eternity in that office waiting room, trying to keep my anxiousness to
get going
at bay. Finally, the man’s secretary came out and apologized, saying her boss wouldn’t be in that day. Something had come up in Florida and someone, she said, would contact me later. I remember leaving that waiting room really disappointed and a bit worried that the deal might somehow fall through.
The deal did fall through, because my prospective boss had been killed that weekend in a car crash. I felt deeply sorry for his family, but I also felt sorry for me. I’d been
that
close to having a financial angel and the kind of dough that would have allowed me to keep my amateur status but ease my way onto the Tour without having to scrape by and live out of the trunk of a car as so many pros did. When I called my father to break the news, he said, “Well, Arn. It’s probably for the best. You’ve got a good job with Wehnes. You stick to that and do a good job and keep playing golf.” It was so
typical of him. Nothing in life came easy, in Pap’s view, and not everything that glittered was gold.
Bill Wehnes was a perfect gentleman about the whole thing, sympathetic even, and more than happy to let me continue in my repping job for him. But that wasn’t the end of the prospective deals. A few days later, another acquaintance from the course called me to his office and said he and a group of fellows would stake me to $10,000 to play the Tour for a year, but the catch was a big one: they wanted the first ten grand I won back and fifty percent of everything else I won after that. The deal was absurd. I was sorely tempted to tell the guy to shove it. Instead, I got up, politely shook his hand and thanked him, then stormed quietly out of his office, wondering what I was going to do next.
There are moments in life when you feel the deck is stacked against you. I felt that way when Buddy Worsham died, and I felt that way when my golden sponsorship deal fell through. I was twenty-five years old and owned nothing more valuable than my golf clubs. Money, or lack of money, was always what kept good players from taking a stab at the vagabond life of a touring professional. Sponsorships weren’t nearly as commonplace or as lucrative as today, and the byways were littered with scores of topflight amateurs who, burdened by families or other financial responsibilities, either took a halfhearted leap and failed or never quite worked up the means or the nerve to try to become the next Snead, Hogan, or Nelson. I knew I had the nerve, possibly the ability, and for one giddy moment I’d even had the means to be the next Hogan. But now my guy was gone and, it seemed, so was my one best shot at a professional golf career.
I knew what my father would have told me. He would
have said to pick up my head and quit complaining and get back to work. So I did that—in more ways than one.
A
great deal has been written about my sixty-one tour victories, seven major championships, and various comebacks and charges. But none of it could have happened without things falling into place the way they did, the sequence of events that took place over the next few weeks at the end of the summer of 1954. In many respects, this was the turning point of my life.
First I drove to Chicago’s Tam O’Shanter Country Club for George S. May’s extravagant two-week golf shindig, which consisted of two back-to-back tournaments—the All American Open and the World Championship of Golf. I was low amateur in the All American, tying for fourteenth in the field, nine strokes ahead of Frank Stranahan. May upped the purse for the World Championship, his crown jewel, to the unheard-of amount of $100,000. The winner that year, Bob Toski, took home $50,000 in cold, hard cash, and was guaranteed an additional $50,000 in the form of fifty confirmed $1,000 exhibition matches. In comparison, an average Tour purse that year was less than $20,000.
In many respects, George S. May was the P. T. Barnum of American golf, a short, stocky, flamboyant former Bible salesman with a well-fed stomach who favored outlandish costumes and was whispered to have had as many pals in the mob as he did in Chicago politics. Someone once commented that May took a game that evolved from humble Scottish peasants and gave it back to them. There was no question he considered golf more of a popular entertainment than a serious game, because between 1941 and 1957 the controversial promoter established the richest purses on the Tour (more than $2 million in prize money), brought television coverage to the course for the first time, and was believed to be the
first to identify players for the convenience of the spectators, many of whom had never been anywhere near a golf course.
I remember hearing what a character George May was long before I ever set eyes on him. Say what you will about him, the man had a flair for promoting golf. Among his innovations, he publicized his events in full-page newspaper ads, was the first to pay hefty appearance fees to top professionals, and was the first to erect spectator bleacher seats beside greens. Among his less dignified antics, he employed clowns and a “masked marvel” golfer to roam the premises and entertain the paying customers, and he gave away hefty door prizes that had nothing to do with golf. His galleries were massive, unschooled in the gentler courtesies of the game, and invariably rowdy. Some players, Ben Hogan for one, were offended by May’s antics, feeling with some justification that his commercial ploys demeaned the game. For example, at one point, to help fans identify the players better, he proposed having them wear numbers on their backs, as athletes do in team sporting events. You should have heard the intense outcry of protest from many players who thought such a stunt was far below their dignity. It was eventually decided that caddies would wear identifying numbers instead, and some time after that, the players’ names wound up on the caddies’ backs.
May’s tournaments were one part sporting event, one part Roman spectacle, and, whatever else was true about him, his timing couldn’t have been better, because the advent of television was suddenly changing the social landscape of American life. This was, fittingly, the setting where Lew Worsham played one of the most exciting shots ever struck, holing a wedge approach for an eagle two on the final hole of the World Championship to beat Chandler Harper by one stroke. Worsham didn’t see the ball go in the hole, but millions of people who had never set foot on a golf course did, thanks to
the fact that the moment was broadcast live on television. Some have speculated that the event did almost as much to popularize golf and the Tour as my own televised charges in the decade that followed. While I prefer to think my athleticism and personality were helpful in attracting a new generation of Americans to the game, there’s undoubtedly truth in that assertion.
The same year that I played in the All American and the World Championship, Sam Snead had edged out Ben Hogan in an eighteen-hole playoff at the Masters, and the debate simmered over who was really the best player in the game at the moment. May grandiosely offered to settle the issue once and for all by tacking an extra $25,000 on the purse for his World Championship; if either man won the championship he would collect no less than $75,000. But Hogan, disgusted as much by May’s antics as by his belief that the PGA Tour should be run by an executive committee instead of the players themselves, stayed home in Texas.
The really interesting news that year was made on the amateur side. Stranahan won low-amateur honors at the World Championship by neatly reversing the outcome from a week before, edging me by a hole. I remember that as we were standing together at the presentation ceremony, Stranny turned to me and said, “You know, Arn, if I don’t win the Amateur next week, I’ve made up my mind to turn pro.” He’d won the British Amateur in 1948, but the U.S. Amateur had always somehow eluded him.
“Muss, why would you want to do that?” I asked him. I was genuinely surprised. After all, even though purses like May’s gaudy windfalls were awful tempting to a working stiff like me, Frank had enough family money to play the game purely for the love of it for an eternity. I certainly would have, in his position.
“Well,” he said, “we’ll see what happens in Detroit.”
* * *
T
he 54th United States Amateur Championship was to be held at the Country Club of Detroit, on a great old golf course recently refurbished by the renowned architect Robert Trent Jones. It was a layout I had never seen. To win the Amateur, it was necessary to play six straight eighteen-hole matches in just four days, then endure the thirty-six-hole semifinals and finals. It was match play all the way, and though 1953 champion Gene Littler wouldn’t be defending (he opted to turn pro instead), the field included the likes of Harvie Ward; Billy Joe Patton, the golf sensation of the year who almost won the Masters and was low amateur at the Open; Don Cherry, the reigning Canadian Amateur champ; public links champion Gene Andrews; the great Willie Turnesa (Amateur champion in 1938 and 1948, and 1947 British Amateur champion); Bill Campbell (Amateur champ in 1964, future president of the USGA, and captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews); and finally the man who’d won every major amateur event in the world save this one—Frank Stranahan.
My first match, beginning at 8:06 on Monday, the twenty-third of August, was against Frank Strafaci, a seven-time winner of the New York Metropolitan title, and it was one of the closest matches I’d played all year. The highlight for me came at the difficult 460-yard par-4 17th, played as a par 5 by the club’s membership, when I decided to hit a 4-wood from a fairway trap. The sand shot failed to reach the putting surface, but my pitch was within five feet of the hole. I holed the putt to win after Strafaci took three to get down from the fringe. Frank’s total score for the round was 71, one more than my even-par total.
An amusing footnote: I don’t remember if it was that evening or the evening before the start of the tournament,
but in an effort to keep myself loose and in a relaxed frame of mind, I invited the model I’d been going out with in Cleveland to come over to Detroit for the week. Unfortunately, Bill Wehnes arrived almost simultaneously and lit into me as my own outraged father would have. “Get her out of here,” he snarled at me paternally. “You’re here to win the Amateur, and you’re not going to do it with her here.”
He knew I would need every ounce of my concentration to make it through the ordeal dead ahead, and he was right. The model went packing.
For my second match I drew a Florida State golfer named John Veghte, and thanks to a lot of bold long putts, I survived another close match to beat him one-up. My third match—against Richard Whiting, a former captain of the Notre Dame golf team—was also unexpectedly tough and required the full eighteen to determine the outcome in my favor, 2 and 1. Again, I attacked pins and putted boldly, though my teenage caddy cheekily informed the press afterward that I was fairly “erratic inside six feet.”
Finally, on Wednesday, for my fourth-round match, I got a break from the USGA, or at least from the golf gods. Walter Andzel fell pretty quickly, 5 and 3, which allowed me to get off the course just as a savage thunderstorm broke, suspending play for almost an hour. The headline for the day, however, was written in the morning rounds when Stranny defeated Harvie Ward one-up in an eighteen-hole thriller that still had the gallery buzzing.
Of course, he was my next opponent.
Despite our friendship, I had plenty of reasons to fear Stranny. In previous match-play challenges his age and experience had dominated, most notably at the North and South, where he whipped me 11 and 10 in a thirty-six-hole semifinal, and at the 1950 Amateur, where he smoked me 4 and 3.
This was Frank’s eleventh run at the National Amateur title, and I knew he would be tougher than a two-dollar steak.
Fortunately, I played nearly perfectly from tee to green and was one under par for the front side, including a couple of deuces, leaving me two up at the turn. Stranny uncharacteristically sprayed his drives into the menacing rough on six of the first twelve holes. I, on the other hand, committed only a couple of costly mistakes—at the 14th, where I drove into the rough, and at 16, where I hit into a bunker. The wind had come up by then, I remember, blowing harder than it had all week, and I was fortunate enough to hit a fine wedge shot to within four feet on 15 to salvage par. Another good approach left me six feet from the cup on 17. I rolled in the birdie and won the match, 3 and 1.