Chasing Greatness Page 2

  The 1962 U.S. Open only confirmed Oakmont’s stature as America’s best course for bestowing golf greatness (later it would be joined by Augusta National). In one of the most famous championships in history, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus tied for the lead after four rounds—totaling the same 283 as Hogan had nine years earlier. Nicklaus, the most accomplished “rookie” in tour history, defeated Palmer in a mild upset (a staggering defeat to distraught Pittsburghers, however). As with Hogan and Snead nine years earlier, the 1962 championship marked another indelible moment at Oakmont, when the two top players of their generation separated themselves out from everyone else.

  It was hard to deny that the modifications club members introduced to Oakmont in the postwar era—without damaging the course’s reputation as quintessentially tough—had produced a better, fairer, and more predictable test of championship golf than during the reign of Fownes and Loeffler.

  For the 1973 U.S. Open, several fairways were pinched and a few bunkers were added or removed: a number of holes arguably played slightly tougher than in the previous championship. On the sixteenth, for example, a strategic bunker that Fownes and Loeffler had placed in front of the green for the 1935 U.S. Open—but which had been removed afterward to ease up on amateurs-was now restored, “changing the whole character of this long par-3.” On the seventeenth, the members spent $10,000 to build a new tee farther back and farther left than the original, in order to fend off exceptionally long hitters: a guarantee that for everyone, this short, dogleg par-four would require two well-executed shots to set up a birdie opportunity.

  Other than that, the course in 1973 remained virtually identical to the course where Snead, Hogan, Nicklaus, and Palmer had finished on top. There was no better place to chase greatness in golf, and to identify the era’s greatest golfers, than Oakmont.

  • DAY ONE •

  June 14, 1973

  • 1 •

  The King Never Left

  Arnold Palmer had made the drive dozens of times.

  Early Thursday morning, June 14, 1973, he once again hopped into his statement Cadillac and headed west. It was just forty-five minutes from his home in Latrobe to Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.

  As he drove, first along U.S. State Route 30, then veering north up the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he passed through the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains and the eastern sections of greater Pittsburgh, the region that for the past decade also went by another name: Arnold Palmer Country.

  At the end of the familiar route, he pulled into the nondescript, austere entry of Oakmont Country Club. It had been thirty-two years since Palmer first visited Oakmont as a precocious twelve-year-old golfer—accompanied by Harry Saxman, president of Latrobe Country Club and an Oakmont member—but not all that much had changed.

  “I think my first round was about 1941,” Palmer said decades after posting what he remembered was a ten-over-par 82. “And I was enthralled with the golf course, with the presence of this place, the locker room, the pro shop, everything here. The wooden floor in the grillroom, all the things that made it feel like a golf club and one that you wanted to be present in. And you wanted to go out and play golf and come back in and have that cool drink, whatever it might be. This was a place that lent itself to golf.”

  A few years later, in August 1945, a fifteen-year-old Arnold Palmer, along with eight thousand other golf fans, crowded Oakmont’s fairways to see Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, Harold “Jug” McSpaden, and Byron Nelson tee off in the Victory Loan golf tournament, a four-day exhibition in which the participants were paid in war bonds. Nelson, nearing the end of the most triumphant season in golf history (eighteen wins, including eleven in a row), recorded the lowest total, three less than Snead. But Oakmont proved the real winner: Nelson, whose 68.33 scoring average that season set a record that would last fifty-five years, finished at seven over par 295. On a daily basis, Oakmont still played as tough as any championship golf course in America.

  Soon Palmer became the area’s top young star, winning five of six West Penn Amateur tournaments between 1947 and 1952. Given his growing local celebrity, as well as his close friendship with Oakmont pro Lew Worsham’s younger brother, Bud, the club’s brass happily invited the brawny local kid to play.

  “I used to play it a lot in my high school days,” Palmer said about Oakmont at the peak of his professional career. “In fact, it almost amounted to a daily diet.”

  Over the years, Palmer did more than just play the club regularly—to the point where it became his second “home” course. From childhood on, Oakmont served as a main stage for landmark moments that defined his illustrious career. There in 1949, he won his second West Penn Amateur title, trouncing four-time champion Jack Benson, 11 & 10 in the final match. Four years later, still a top-notch amateur, he competed in his first U.S. Open at the then par-seventy-two course, missing the cut while Ben Hogan cruised to his fourth and final national title in 1953. A decade later, Oakmont was the site of Palmer’s most painful career disappointment, when his putter betrayed him and the favored King of the PGA Tour lost the 1962 U.S. Open to upstart Jack Nicklaus in an eighteen-hole play-off.

  And now, at forty-three years of age, Arnold Palmer—his hair slightly grayed, his body saddled with aches and ailments, yet still hungry as ever for victory-returned to conquer treacherous Oakmont and raise an eighth major championship trophy into the air.

  Palmer’s march to iconic status in golf history was unprecedented in so many ways. Equal parts sports star and sex symbol—an anomaly for a game as buttoned-down as golf—he somehow blended a plainspoken, aw-shucks celebrity with creative, aggressive entrepreneurship to build an empire. That empire recast modern golf as a business and spawned IMG, the behemoth of modern-day global marketing. And, on the golf course, Palmer flashed the kind of raw energy and transparent emotion that enabled a TV-addicted generation of postwar Americans not merely to share but viscerally feel his joys and disappointments from thousands of miles away.

  But it was especially refreshing that a man so well-known across the globe—and so fabulously wealthy—still woke up each summer morning in his tiny, blue-collar hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. In fact, the relatively modest, middle-class home in which he and his wife, Winnie, lived stood just a solid tee shot from the small, undistinguished quarters adjacent to the sixth tee of Latrobe Country Club in which he grew up; on the same fields where, as a boy, Arnold and his father, Milfred “Deacon” Palmer, hunted pheasants and rabbits to supplement the family diet during the depths of the Great Depression.

  His choice of residence was no small virtue, and no calculated PR stunt. Even though he dined with movie stars, played golf with presidents, and won recognition in 1970 as Sports Illustrated’s Athlete of the Decade for the 1960s—edging out names like Ali, Russell, Mantle, and Unitas—Palmer never became too big for Latrobe. To be sure, he was far shrewder and more downright intelligent than he often let on, and not only about the game of golf. He also craved wealth, fame, and some of their perks; his conservative Republican politics reflected his rapid ascent into the status of the superrich (his father, by contrast, remained a staunch Rooseveltian Democrat). Palmer remained happily secure in his core small-town identity.

  And in the spring of 1973, Palmer leaned on his hometown roots more than ever.

  DURING THE 1950S AND 1960S, Arnold Palmer won more tournaments, prize money, and public adoration than anyone ever imagined possible in the game of golf. Great sports stars abounded in the postwar era, but not since Babe Ruth in the 1920s had anyone earned the sovereign mantle of “the King.”

  But, as Shakespeare’s King Henry IV observes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

  For all the miracles that King Arnie performed during his reign—sinking impossible putts, driving undrivable greens, recovering brilliantly from sand and forest, stealing the 1960 U.S. Open with a final-round 65 for the greatest comeback in history—the public remained fickle. Fed by a gaggle of golf journalists who
mingled intimately with the touring pros, the fan bandwagon got lighter at any sign of adversity.

  As early as 1965, Palmer’s worst year in a decade on tour, the whispers began. He turned thirty-six that fall and had won only one tournament in the previous seventeen months. The “What’s wrong with Arnie?” chatter swelled. He rebounded the following season, winning three times and nabbing top-ten finishes in each of the four major championships. But a breathtaking collapse in the final round of the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club stuck in the minds of fans and writers. Despite a seven-stroke lead with nine holes to play, Palmer lost his concentration and composure down the stretch, and the following day he lost the 1966 National title to Billy Casper in a play-off.

  After winning seven major championships in seven seasons (1958-1964), an emotionally draining string of five runner-up finishes in majors plagued Palmer in the late 1960s. Sportswriters who understood the facts were puzzled by the failures: Until the end of the decade, Palmer remained competitive both with Nicklaus and the dozens of can’t-miss All American collegians who funneled onto the tour.

  “At the age of 39,” wrote Dave Anderson of the New York Times, Palmer “has not won a tournament on the Professional Golfers’ Association tour this year and he has earned only $34,967, hardly enough to keep his Lear jet in fuel. Physically, he hasn’t changed much. His neck appears carved out of mahogany. His hands are thick, his stomach flat, and he seems to march, rather than stroll, onto a green. But he isn’t winning.”

  Palmer didn’t duck his critics. In fact, he agreed with some popular theories about why he could no longer win the big ones.

  “I will admit,” he told reporters in June 1969, at the age of thirty-nine, “I’ve been a bit preoccupied with my business interests. I need to settle down and start concentrating more. I intend to do it. I see no reason why I shouldn’t start winning again.”

  Palmer’s collection of dry cleaners, golf resorts, car dealerships, etc., certainly consumed his mental energy and disrupted his practice sessions between tournaments. Three times during the decade he actually passed up the British Open—the event he single-handedly resuscitated by finishing second in 1960 and winning the event the next two years—claiming other business obligations.

  But it was a host of medical issues that speared him on the course. Though his muscles still rippled and he appeared virile, even indestructible, on TV and magazine covers, the kid from just outside Pittsburgh was no longer the man of steel.

  For one, Palmer’s eyesight declined steadily (extreme nearsightedness) during his thirties and he had a hard time addressing the problem on the golf course. He switched back and forth between glasses and contact lenses, sometimes shunning both out of sheer frustration. Palmer wasn’t yet ready to accept the early signs of aging. Years later, he tellingly called the situation “the most traumatic thing that happened in my career.”

  Palmer’s back also troubled him. A month before his U.S. Open nightmare at the Olympic Club, Palmer nearly fell to his knees in severe pain after teeing off in the second round of the Greater New Orleans Open. He withdrew from the tournament the next day.

  Three years later, an injured hip hampered his entire 1969 season. In March, he took two weeks off to ease a chronic ache in his hip that had actually emerged in the late 1950s, but that he had kept from the public. Unfortunately none of the home remedies sent by his beloved fans—liniments, pads, exercises-brought relief from the considerable stress caused by his unorthodox, whiplash swing (as Sam Snead said, on Palmer’s every tee shot he appeared to be trying to drive the green). After losing his exemption to play in the U.S. Open for the first time, and having to compete in a sectional qualifier to earn entry—Palmer didn’t say so, but his fans complained to the U.S.G.A. that this was beneath the King’s dignity—he gritted through and heroically tied for sixth at the Champions Golf Club in Houston, just three shots behind the surprise winner, Orville Moody.

  But the hip never really healed. A woeful 82 at the NCR Country Club in Dayton, Ohio, to begin the PGA Championship in August, followed by numbing pain when he awoke the next morning to play the second round, forced Palmer to withdraw—his first and only withdrawal from a major championship. Doctors suggested that he take a long rest and let the hip heal. While friends like Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus scoffed at the notion that Palmer’s career was in jeopardy, others were not as optimistic.

  “Arnie had to withdraw from the PGA Tournament the other day with an inflamed hip,” golfer Frank Beard wrote in his on-the-tour diary that soon became a bestselling book. “Nobody’s got more determination or more spirit, but this time I really think he’s finished,” Beard dourly concluded after witnessing the agony Palmer was suffering.

  Sentiments like these inspired rumors in 1969 that Palmer might leave golf for politics. Widely known as a friend and Augusta golfing partner of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Palmer later met privately with President Richard M. Nixon, a closet golfer, to offer his thoughts on ending the Vietnam War. His celebrity, charm, and likability convinced Republican strategists he might be the man to run for governor of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1970 against Democrat Milton Shapp. The idea gained enough momentum that only two weeks after his withdrawal from the PGA, Palmer had to issue a written statement to the press declaring that golf—not politics—was his profession for the foreseeable future.

  The following week, Sports Illustrated trumpeted the passing of a spent hero into the fading status of a timeless legend. On September 1, nine days before his birthday, Palmer’s face, his brow wrinkled, appeared on the cover of the magazine beneath the headline, “Farewell to an Era: Arnold Palmer Turns 40.”

  Inside the magazine, legendary golf writer Dan Jenkins stated that the issue’s goal was “not to signal an end to the Age of Palmer, but to salute it.” And salute it Jenkins did, by re-creating the U.S. Open win in 1960, painting with words a picture of Palmer as the masculine, heroic people’s champion, even suggesting that Palmer had recently “given a nobility to losing.” The “Age of Palmer” sounded like a salute to a retired warrior from the distant past.

  Palmer’s exit from golf’s spotlight in 1969 did not last long. Accustomed to these doomsday appraisals—he had been addressing them for years, and with considerable candor—he simply ignored this latest set. He stayed away from the tour for eight weeks and, begrudgingly, followed his doctor’s advice and played sparingly. And perhaps to send a clear signal to pessimists like Beard, while away from the tour and “resting,” he shot a career-low score of 60 during a warm-up at Latrobe Country Club, the homestead where he had learned to live the game (and which he purchased two years later, enabling his father to work there forever).

  In three autumn events after he returned to the tour, Palmer finished no better than twenty-seventh, but he managed to break par in half of the rounds, was relatively pain-free, and was confident his game was improving each week. Then, beginning on Thanksgiving Day 1969, Palmer boldly reclaimed his place among the game’s greats. Over Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, he nabbed three birdies on the opening seven holes to share the first-round lead at the Heritage Golf Classic. By Sunday afternoon, Palmer had secured his first win in over a year.

  “This was as important to me as winning the National Open or the Masters or anything,” he told reporters afterward in a euphoric display of a forty-year-old’s delight. As he well knew, Ben Hogan had his greatest year on tour in 1953 at age forty-one, and Palmer’s longtime competitors Julius Boros and Sam Snead remained long off the tee and were winners well into their forties. After the triumph at Harbour Town, no one could deny that Palmer glory still lay ahead.

  Palmer needed only one more week to fully reveal his resurrection. Though eleven under par after three rounds at the Danny Thomas-Diplomat Classic in Miami, he still trailed a red-hot Gay Brewer, former Masters champion, by six strokes. But no one charged a golf course, or a leader board, on the final day like Arnold Palmer. Just before closing out the front nine in on
ly thirty strokes-just as at Cherry Hills, missing a hole in one by inches on the ninth—Palmer reduced Brewer’s lead to three. Consecutive birdies on numbers fourteen and fifteen gave Palmer a share of the lead, and he then surged in front for good by two-putting for birdie on the par-five seventeenth. He then put an exclamation point on the comeback win by draining a twenty-foot birdie putt at the home hole.

  “Getting it going again is probably the thing I wanted most in my life,” he said afterward. “I knew I was going to play again, but I didn’t know how successfully. There were some doubts in my own mind.”

  A bit uncertain, perhaps—as a forty-year-old superstar athlete should rightly be. But three months earlier, Jenkins’s Sports Illustrated article had reminded everyone that it was Palmer who set the standard for great comeback victories, and on that Sunday in Miami—his last tournament of the 1960s—Palmer did it again with a heroic closing-round 65.

  OVER THE NEXT TWO SEASONS, 1970 and 1971, Palmer played superbly. He won five PGA events (four in 1971), finished fifth and third, respectively, on the tour money list, and enjoyed one of the top-five scoring averages on tour (though he, like Nicklaus, did not play in enough tournaments to compete for the Vardon Trophy). And had it not been for a miraculous final round eagle by Dave Stockton, Palmer might have won the 1970 PGA Championship at Southern Hills. Instead, he settled for second place—his sixth runner-up finish in his previous twenty-three major championships.

  Palmer fared even better in the majors in 1972. In what he called “probably the toughest Open I’ve played in,” Palmer battled Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, and an unusually firm and nasty Pebble Beach course for three days. His game was razor-sharp on Friday. As did his Wake Forest protégé, Lanny Wadkins, Palmer carded the tournament’s lowest round of 68. When he drained a thirty-footer for a birdie at the windy third hole on Sunday, Palmer tied for the lead. But the back nine was less kind and, unable to make a birdie as the miserable weather deteriorated, he settled for third place.