Chasing Greatness Read online

  On the heels of that fine showing, Palmer tied for seventh at the British Open in Muirfield, and knocked in five birdies during the first round of the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills to sit just a stroke off the lead; he finished the tournament tied for sixteenth. In late October, Palmer walked to the seventy-second green at the Sahara Invitational in Las Vegas, twelve feet from forcing a play-off with Wadkins, two decades his junior. He narrowly missed the putt and finished alone in second place.

  Though Palmer went winless in 1972 for the first time in his eighteen-year PGA career, he proved himself a serious contender wherever he chose to play, finishing eleventh in scoring average and posting eleven top-ten finishes in only twenty-three starts. Only Nicklaus, Trevino, Grier Jones, and Bruce Crampton scored more top-ten finishes in 1972, and the latter three each played in many more tournaments (Jones played thirty-five, Trevino thirty-two, and Crampton twenty-nine).

  After two mediocre performances in California to start the 1973 season, Palmer tied for twenty-second at the Hawaiian Open in early February, where, at the Waialae Country Club, little-known veteran John Schlee won his first event in nearly a decade on tour. Even in the faraway paradise of Honolulu, Palmer was still the main attraction. Immediately following the tournament, along with Jerry Heard and two Japanese golfers, Masashi “Jumbo” Ozaki and Takaaki Kono, he traveled to Maui to compete in a pair of taped matches to be broadcast in Japan.

  Monday morning, he awoke at five a.m. and hit the course to practice. In between bantering with the crowd, signing autographs, and posing for photographs, he cruised to a ten-stroke victory over Masashi, Japan’s top golfer. After the match, Palmer quickly boarded a plane back to the States and then captained his private jet to Palm Springs, where he would compete in the Bob Hope Desert Classic that week.

  On Palmer’s schedule the very next day: first, an early morning business meeting; second, eighteen holes of golf to raise funds for a local charity; third, a groundbreaking ceremony at a nearby resort that he was building; fourth, a return appearance to socialize at the charity event; and fifth, an evening banquet.

  Just another ordinary day in the life of Arnold Palmer.

  When asked why he kept so busy at age forty-three, after achieving so much success in every phase of life, Palmer was unyielding.

  “I’ve got to.... It’s the way I am. If I quit, I’d be climbing the walls. It’s just my nature to keep busy. I’d go nuts if I didn’t,” he told a sportswriter. “I love to play golf.... I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t play. I’ve been away from the game at times and it’s been misery.”

  With his business for the week completed, Palmer turned his attention toward the five-day, ninety-hole, southern California golf tournament/celebrity extravaganza. During the annual event, touring pros played the first four rounds on four different courses with amateur stars like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, astronaut Alan Shepard, and, of course, Bob Hope himself.

  Palmer started with a pedestrian 71, but then began to wield a hot putter. A 66 on Thursday at Tamarisk, paired with a 69 at La Quinta, suggested that the eighteen-month victory drought might come to an end.

  Many of the more traditional and reserved touring pros despised the pompous amateurs and garish hoopla that shaped Bob Hope’s desert circus. But Palmer adored Hope, not only for his decades of sacrifice in entertaining servicemen (including former enlistees like himself during the height of the Korean War), but also because he viewed Hope as second only to President Eisenhower in popularizing the game and elevating the top professionals into bona fide celebrities. And Palmer reveled in the fun-loving, hard-drinking, ultracelebrity setting, dominating the event throughout his career—four wins in the previous fourteen years. When he rolled in lengthy birdie putts on the final two holes at Bermuda Dunes on Saturday, he sat just one in back of Nicklaus and twenty-five-year-old Johnny Miller, the heralded youngster from California who carded a jaw-dropping 63 on Saturday to spring into a tie for the lead.

  On Sunday, the pros finally said good-bye to their amateur partners and returned to Bermuda Dunes for a very un-Palm Springs-like final round. The course became a drenched oasis in the desert moonscape, thanks to torrential rains and gale-force winds the night before, but the thirty thousand spectators who braved the elements earned a special treat: Palmer and Nicklaus (along with John Schlee) were paired together in the final group.

  “There was a time when Jack and I played each other instead of the course, but not anymore,” Palmer assured reporters who strained to hype their head-to-head matchup. “I remember a couple of times we did it and a third man came along and beat us both.”

  When the celebrated grouping commenced play, Palmer picked up right where he left off the previous day. He birdied number one and excited “Arnie’s Army,” which was in its “usual form, cheering mistakes by Nicklaus and the other leaders, chatting and running while other players shot and roaring every time Arnie hitched up his pants.” As they sloshed through the wet course, Palmer kept Nicklaus and the others at bay early with a birdie on number four. But the rain and the wind intensified, exacerbating the already difficult conditions: Low scores were impossible.

  “I kept thinking the round would be rained out,” Miller said about his day, which began with a one over thirty-seven on the front nine. “I couldn’t concentrate.”

  Ignoring the soaked greens and the drops of rain that spotted his glasses—this week he chose to wear spectacles—Palmer stayed dialed in all day. He dropped a clutch nine-footer to save par on number one and led Nicklaus by two shots as the final group reached the eighteenth tee.

  But the Golden Bear would not let up. On the 501-yard, par-five closing hole, he launched a monster drive high above the soaked Bermuda Dunes turf, then reached the green with his second stroke, leaving an eighteen-foot eagle putt that might steal yet another victory from his rival. Palmer, unable to match Nicklaus’s length, was left with a short wedge to set up a birdie putt that looked like it might be necessary to secure the win.

  Palmer pitched adroitly to within eight feet of the cup, and when Nicklaus’s eagle flirted with the edge but failed to drop, all he had to do was two-putt and the $32,000 first-place prize was his. With vintage Palmer electricity, he rolled in the birdie, spun around in joy, and tossed his visor into the thrilled, rudely partisan, umbrella-toting gallery.

  “When you haven’t won as long as I hadn’t, you start thinking you might never again. But I made up my mind this year that I was going to do some things differently and try my hardest to win.”

  Afterward, Palmer admitted that the victory was especially rewarding because he had edged out Nicklaus, mano a mano, whom he had tried (in vain) not to compete with directly.

  “[I feared] someone else might sneak in and Johnny Miller almost did it,” Palmer said. Despite the weather distractions, the spirited young Californian had regained his focus on the back nine and pulled within one shot of Palmer with three holes left. He finished second, tied with Nicklaus.

  Sports pages all across the nation ran the photo of the smiling King hurling his visor into the crowd. Vice President Spiro Agnew, a frequent participant in the celebrity-studded tournament, flew in on the final day just to see Palmer close it out, and along with Bob Hope, he awarded Palmer his check and trophy.

  “I hope,” Palmer told his audience, “it’s not as long before my next win.”

  PALMER’S TRIUMPH IN THE DESERT, especially in such dramatic fashion, helped to quash some of the “Arnie is through” talk that had naturally grown during his winless 1972 season. Two days afterward, famed columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times best captured the joy sports fans everywhere felt in Palmer’s rejuvenation:Call the florist and tell him to cancel the wreath. Call the stoneyard and tell them never mind the headstone, the one which was to read “Here Lies the Golf Game of A. Palmer Which Died of Natural Causes in the Left Rough of a Par-5 Sometime in 1971. R.I.P.”

  Cancel the wreath, for sure, but the win unfortunately didn
’t provide a catalyst for Palmer after the players left the West Coast in mid-February of 1973. He did no better than eighteenth in the next seven events. And while a fifth Bob Hope title had proved he could still win against stiff competition, Palmer still burned for another major championship, starting, of course, with a fifth Green Jacket at Augusta National. An ugly opening round buried his dream from the start.

  “I’m not upset, but I’m disgusted. I’m not upset because I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised I shot 77. And that’s what upset me,” he said afterward. “I think the only thing to do is get away from it, maybe for a month, and just practice. I think I’ll do that—just pack it in until I start playing better or ...”

  But Palmer, as the world’s most famous golfer, could not retreat from the limelight that easily. With Palmer obligated to play in New Orleans the following week in the Tournament of Champions, his mood stayed sour, after he failed to break par in any of the four rounds.

  “I’ll play Byron Nelson next week and if I don’t do any better than I have been, I might not play again until the U.S. Open. I really don’t know, but I might just take the time off and try to get ready for the Open.”

  Palmer stayed true to his word. A final-round 77 the next week in Dallas hastened his hiatus from the weekly grind in order to revamp his game and prepare his mind for the rigors of the next major championship—the U.S. Open, just six weeks away.

  To every touring pro, amateur, or club pro who is fortunate enough to qualify, the National Open brings about a harsh self-reckoning. The U.S.G.A. toughens up each site to the point where it can forever erode the confidence of a player not in command of every aspect of his game. For Palmer, the Open had been the stage for both his greatest triumph—the comeback at Cherry Hills—and several of his greatest disappointments. Since his only U.S. Open win in 1960, he had finished in the top five seven times, without a title to show for it. Most agonizingly, he had three times found himself on the losing end of an eighteen-hole play-off.

  But the 1973 U.S. Open meant so much more to the man who hadn’t won a major title in nine seasons.

  This year, the Open was returning to Oakmont. There he would receive a hero’s welcome, the beloved western Pennsylvania son returning to play before his hometown fans. For each of Palmer’s fifty-nine individual PGA triumphs, none had come in the Pittsburgh area (twice, Palmer, playing a four-ball tournament with Nicklaus as his partner, had won PGA events at Laurel Valley in Ligonier, Pennsylvania). To win the National Open on his own turf—sacred turf, both he and his dad fervently believed—would culminate a lifelong quest. And the thousands of local soldiers in Arnie’s Army—those who knew him well long before he became the King—desperately wanted their idol to win on Pittsburgh soil, rather than among the palm trees of Orlando, his winter home, or the dogwoods of Augusta.

  But a U.S. Open win at Oakmont offered an additional incentive that no other venue could match: redemption. It was there on June 17, 1962—Father’s Day—that Palmer, the world’s most celebrated golfer, lost a U.S. Open play-off to a twenty-two-year-old, winless tour rookie. Of course, that rookie was two-time U.S. Amateur champion Jack Nicklaus, who would soon redefine the boundaries of major championship greatness. Still, Nicklaus’s upset of Palmer at Oakmont in 1962 shook the golf world.

  That Palmer-Nicklaus play-off became canonized as one of modern sport’s most memorable one-on-one showdowns. Just as well remembered was the gallery’s unsportsmanlike, blatantly cruel mocking of Nicklaus during the play-off round. The fans also noisily hustled off to chase Palmer’s ball or reposition themselves to watch his next shot while Nicklaus was preparing to play. Beyond that, many shouted scurrilous insults at the portly, crew-cut, sloppily dressed Nicklaus in order to undermine his concentration. (Not until the early 1970s did the Golden Bear slim down, grow out his blond locks, and become a crowd and fashion favorite.)

  As always, after Palmer lost he showed pure class, smiling for photographers, praising the new champion, and articulating one of the great prophetic sound bites in sports history:

  “Now that the big guy is out of the cage, everybody better run for cover.”

  But the loss stung deeply.

  Nicklaus’s victory stunned the sports nation, not just because he defeated the game’s greatest player, but because of how he did it.

  He regularly outdrove the strappingly built Palmer, one of the game’s longest hitters, by twenty to thirty yards. And he eradicated Palmer’s chief hometown advantage by completely outplaying him on Oakmont’s singular greens. The statistic most often used to explain Palmer’s defeat was startling: eleven three-putt greens by Palmer, compared to only one by Nicklaus.

  “I wanted every putt to drop and when I missed the first try, I was in a daze. That’s the only way I can explain those short ones I missed,” Palmer concluded. His three three-putts during the play-off (none for Nicklaus) stood out most during Nicklaus’s 74-to-71 play-off victory, and reflected more generally what Palmer refused to admit: He never putted great on superfast greens (the speed of Augusta National’s typically Southern, Bermuda-grass greens didn’t compare with Oakmont’s greens during the 1960s).

  The putting gloom that week devastated Palmer, especially since he fully understood that no one could succeed by putting Oakmont’s keen greens “aggressively.” Yet, lost in the commentary about why he lost was how fantastically he had struck every other club in his bag. In regulation play, Palmer hit an incredible sixty-three of seventy-two greens, and in the play-off his tee-to-green game was equally sharp. To score thirteen bogeys while missing only nine greens in regulation play was the kind of statistic that made a fearless scrambler like Palmer cringe at the possibilities he threw away.

  “I can’t play any better than I played here and I couldn’t win,” he told the press.

  The 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont was the stage where Nicklaus began to overtake Palmer as the world’s greatest golfer. But the transition took much longer than golf fans and journalists often remember.

  For the eight years in the 1960s that Palmer and Nicklaus were both professionals (1962-1969), they shared nearly same the amount of victories: twenty-nine for Palmer and thirty for Nicklaus. And the number of runner-up finishes in major championships was also virtually identical: six for Palmer and seven for Nicklaus. Major wins became where Nicklaus overwhelmed Palmer during these eight years: only one for Palmer versus six for Nicklaus.

  So, after the finest tee-to-green ball striking of his career, before thousands of die-hard fans on a course he knew better than anyone in the field, Palmer opened the door for the man who would usurp his throne. A win by Palmer in 1973 at Oakmont obviously would not undo Nicklaus’s surge to golfing greatness (seven wins in 1972, including two majors). But the thought of redemption had driven Palmer throughout his career—he regularly recycled past defeats in his mind as a spur to future achievement—and in 1973 he wanted to remind the world that, not so long ago, major championships and Arnold Palmer heroics were synonymous.

  “Ever since I lost in 1962, I’ve been waiting for the Open to come back to Oakmont,” he admitted two days before the 1973 championship began. “This is my country; I am very eager to redeem myself.”

  No one was better suited to help Arnold Palmer achieve that lofty goal than the man who had taught him everything he knew about golf: his sixty-eight-year-old father, Deacon Palmer.

  PALMER DID NOT PLAY ANOTHER event in the four weeks following the Byron Nelson tournament at the end of April. He did, however, maintain much of his typically harried, around-the-globe golfing schedule, including a hospital charity exhibition at Hidden Valley Country Club in Reno and the filming of The Best 18 Holes in America, a three-part television series featuring courses all over the country. Even when he “took off” from the tour, he didn’t shun the obligations (or financial rewards) of celebrity. He happily met public expectations-just as long as the demands centered on golf.

  At a press conference to promote the Reno exhibition in early
May, a reporter asked Palmer what made him so successful. His answer was simple, his personal identity crystal clear.

  “A great amount of desire to play golf,” he responded. “It’s been a life’s ambition since I’ve been a youngster. It’s never fluttered. It never went away. It’s still there.” In between business ventures, Palmer flew back to Latrobe, parking his private plane barely a mile from his home and playing regularly on the course where he had grown up. In mid-May, the power brokers at Oakmont offered him a nonresident membership (though even he had to pay a $5,000 membership fee). Now eligible to play in the club’s intraclub competition known as the SWAT (invented by H. C. Fownes) while tuning up for the Open, Palmer jumped at the opportunity.

  Although Oakmont made for a second home as a teenager, Palmer had actually not played the course since losing the 1962 play-off to Nicklaus. There had been only a few changes to the course over the past decade.

  In the weeks prior to the Open, Palmer played in the SWAT a handful of times and reinforced his memories of each hole. But his major preparation was back home in Latrobe, hitting practice balls under his father’s sharp eye.

  Early in the 1973 season, Gardner Dickinson, a tour regular and a Hogan disciple, told Deacon (or “Pap,” as Arnold called him) that a bad habit had crept into Arnold’s swing and undermined his consistency. Arnold acknowledged the problem and tried various corrections while still on tour, but each piecemeal “fix” not surprisingly generated new difficulties.