Men in Green (4 page)

If Arnold was profound, or had unique insight into the human condition, I didn't know about it. And yet there he was, just south of John Wayne. And what did he do to get there? He won a bunch of golf tournaments with more than a soupçon of style. He mixed iced tea with lemonade. He stayed married. He attached his name to a hospital and other good causes. He made people feel good. And that evidently was enough. That was enough to allow a small-town man playing a niche sport for no money to wind up on the highest floor of the American Pantheon Building, in a paneled room with an open bar. How on earth did that happen? What was it about the man that
allowed
that to happen?

His home state rolled by, her craggy farms and sleepy rivers almost blotted out by the blue-black October night.

•  •  •

We arrived at the SpringHill Suites in Latrobe, at 115 Arnold Palmer Drive, late at night. Arnold was a part owner. Our rooms were $125 per night, make-your-own-waffle breakfast included.

At the front desk were free copies of a magazine called
Kingdom
. The walls were a collage of Arnold Palmer photographs. In the lobby, a group of middle-aged men, hotel guests, were carting around golf bags. I asked the man in front of me on the check-in line if they were playing in some sort of tournament. He showed no interest in conversation. “Could you believe that fucking guy?” Mike said later. “He's looking at you like, ‘Who the fuck are you to talk to me?' ”

Maybe you're wondering: Could Mike not squeeze one more
fuck
into those two sentences? Evidently, no. I'm not trying to shock anybody here. I am trying to capture people as they actually are. I assume that's why you're here.

When I was setting up the trip to Latrobe, I asked Donald “Doc” Giffin, Palmer's aide-de-camp since 1966, if Mike could come, too. He and Arnold knew him and were happy to have him.

“He's one of the best reporters I know,” I told Doc.

He is. Mike is the best natural reporter I know. He challenges every assumption.

“I didn't know that about Mike,” Doc said. Doc is a stolid man, like Arnold himself.

There were many older sportswriters who knew Arnold far better than I, but I knew him. I'd done maybe a dozen interviews with him over the span of twenty-five years. I'd been alone with him, which I note because it's uncommon. Arnold likes to have a group around him whenever possible. I've ordered Arnold Palmers at lunches with him. I once asked him what it's like when people order an Arnold Palmer in his presence. “It's a little embarrassing,” he said.

The photograph of Arnold on the Arizona Arnold Palmer Half & Half cans is an interesting choice. In the shot, Arnold's hair is silver and flopped down over his browed forehead. He's in his late fifties. In other words, it's Arnold long after his athletic prime. But that was part of the marketing genius behind Arnold Palmer Enterprises. Don't sell the golfer, because his golf skill will come and go. Sell the man.

Arnold in the 1980s, when he was in his fifties, was still having a good time. Mike played with Arnold in the early 1990s at a Peter Jacobsen charity tournament in Oregon, and Arnold told Mike that his “best times” were in his fifties. But it's not like Arnold went into a cave the day he turned sixty. Far from it. Just take a look at the clips of him playing his final U.S. Open in 1994 at a sweltering Oakmont. Arnold marched up and down Oakmont's hills, sweating through a white shirt and a floppy straw hat, waving at fans like he was in a parade. Nobody cared what he was shooting. Over his ball he was still making that familiar, oomphy crazy swing. He was sixty-four and still virile.

About five years after that Open, I was in the California Pizza Kitchen on PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, near the PGA of America headquarters. I had ordered an iced tea and lemonade mixed together. The young waitress said, “Oh, you mean an Arnold Palmer.”

“Do you know who that is?” I asked.

She didn't. She just knew the name as a drink.

The check came, a computer-generated check at a national chain restaurant, and right on it were the words
ARNOLD PALMER
.

The next day I was with Arnold Palmer. We were in his workroom in his townhouse at Bay Hill. I told him what had happened at the California Pizza Kitchen. He got out the most slender cell phone I had ever seen, called his business manager, and relayed the story. He said, “Is there a name-rights issue here we should be looking into?”

One more thing before we go in and see the man: In 2000, as a paid spokesman for Callaway, Arnold endorsed a driver called the ERC II, a club legal for play everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico. (The Royal and Ancient Golf Club had approved it and the USGA had not.) In an opinion piece in
SI
, my friend and fellow writer Gary Van Sickle eviscerated Arnold over his endorsement. In editing, the piece only became tougher. The headline was
BENEDICT ARNOLD
. The subhead was a kick in the teeth:
When Arnold Palmer said it was O.K. to cheat, his reign as the King ended
.

Word came back quickly that Arnold was really annoyed. He had won the U.S. Amateur in '54, the year
SI
began publishing, and the magazine had run a long, detailed report by Herbert Warren Wind about his win. Arnold was the magazine's Sportsman of the Year in 1960. His heyday and the magazine's were one and the same. My boss told me to call Arnold and take his temperature. Through Doc, I got Arnold on the phone with relative ease. I said, “Arnold, this is Michael Bamberger with
SI
.”

“I know who you are,” Palmer said. “And evidently you don't give a shit
who
you write for these days.”

That's exactly what he said to me on a fall day in 2000 when I got him on the phone and he was all pissed off at my magazine. I loved it. There's too much chickenshit corporate-speak from athletes these days. It was so nice to hear something real.

•  •  •

Even I could not get lost, finding Arnold's offices at One Legends Lane, across the street from the entrance to the Latrobe Country Club. Yeah, sure, that address—it's a bit much, but so what? Nicklaus likes to say that you could not enjoy being whoever you are more than Arnold Palmer enjoys being Arnold Palmer.
Legends Lane
.

Arnold's offices were housed in a one-story white brick building, uncannily similar to the wings attached to the Augusta National clubhouse, not even a half mile from the first tee at Latrobe, where Arnold's father worked all his adult life as the greenkeeper and club pro. (As soon as he could, Arnold bought the club.) On the downhill side of Legends Lane is the house Arnold built with Winnie, his first wife, who died in 1999. That house is a modest brick rancher where Arnold and Winnie lived for forty-two years and raised their two daughters.

On the uphill side of Legends Lane is a modern wooden home, almost camouflaged by the trees that flank it. Arnold built that house with his second wife, Kit Palmer, whom he married in 2005. When they're not at Bay Hill or in the California desert that's where they live.

Mike and I arrived early, and Doc, in a sport coat and tie, ushered us into Arnold's office. Arnold was wearing a brown plaid shirt and had a green sweater draped over his shoulders.

Maybe you've had this experience, that moment of shock when you're face-to-face with a legend, even if you're semi-accustomed to seeing the person on TV. Some odd thought crosses your mind.
Man, that Doris Kearns Goodwin is . . . skinny!
I have had the moment with President Ford and President Clinton. (Golf got me to both.) I have had it with John Wooden, Henry Aaron, Caroline Kennedy. And I have it every time I see Arnold Palmer. It's hard to describe what happens, but it's kind of like his old Pennzoil ads and snapshots from his Augusta heyday and assorted other mental pictures all converge at once.

Arnold, two years younger than my father and eighteen months older than my mother, looked great, tanned and strong. He was energetic. He had recently turned eighty-three. He was sitting in a big brown leather desk chair that did not dwarf him. He stood to shake our hands.

Mike and I sat in chairs in front of Arnold's desk. Doc sat nearby with his personal Arnold Palmer record book in his lap. We went in with no agenda except to try to get Arnold to talk about something meaningful to him, to talk about a time when every day seemed exciting and fresh and new.

With gentle assistance from Doc, Mike and I opened a door for Arnold marked
1954
. And Arnold walked through it. His speech, right from the beginning, was slow and measured and precise. He began with his win at the U.S. Amateur at the Country Club of Detroit in late August 1954. He was almost twenty-five, a bachelor, an ex–Coast Guardsman, a Wake Forest dropout. He was living in Cleveland and selling paint. He came from a workingman's club nobody knew, and in the final he defeated a tall, slim member of the Long Island golf establishment. (In Herb Wind's
SI
account of the event you might detect just a hint of class warfare.) Arnold half-bellowed to his secretary and asked her to bring Mike and me copies of a slender, privately published book about the '54 Amateur called
The Turning Point
. They were pre-signed in Arnold's perfect script.

From Detroit, Arnold took us to early September '54, a few days after his win in the Amateur, when he and three buddies made the four-hundred-mile drive from Cleveland to the Shawnee Resort, on the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania. They went there to play in an amateur tournament over Labor Day weekend. Fred Waring was the host. He was a celebrity bandleader and the inventor of the Waring blender.

Arnold was revisiting his introduction to a nineteen-year-old Pembroke College student named Winnie Walzer of Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, daughter of Martin Walzer, an owner of a canned-foods business, and Mary Walzer, a schoolteacher.

“I met her on Tuesday morning, she and Dixie Waring, Fred's daughter, at the hotel at Shawnee,” Arnold said. “They were coming down the stairs, and I was there registering. Somebody said, ‘You want to meet a couple of good-looking girls?' And I said, ‘Hell yes.' I was single. And they introduced me to Dixie and Winnie. It was my shot. I could take either one. They were both available.”

Some of the story was vaguely familiar to me from Arnold's autobiography,
A Golfer's Life
. But this version was unvarnished.

“So I said to Winnie, ‘Why don't you come follow me?'

“She says, ‘I can't follow you. We just met. I have to follow Uncle Fred.' That was the first day.

“The second day I told her again that she should follow me. So she did.

“My partner was Tommy—what was his name, guy from Detroit—Tommy Sheehan. He was a good player. And we romped the field. We won going away. And Saturday night I said to Winnie at the banquet, ‘Will you marry me?'

“She said, ‘Well, can I have a few days?'

“I said, ‘Not really. You better decide pretty quick.'

“And she said, ‘Well, give me a day or two and let me talk to my parents.' ”

Let's pause for a moment to let this all sink in: He met the girl, a nineteen-year-old, on a Tuesday. He proposed four days later. He was about to turn twenty-five, and suddenly after some years of not doing very much he had an epic to-do list. Getting married was on it. He got his yes a day after he asked, but it came with an asterisk.

“She said, ‘My parents don't like the idea.'

“Her dad hated my ass. He said to her, ‘You're going to marry a golf pro?' ”

A few days after the Fred Waring tournament, Arnold borrowed money from his Cleveland gang and bought an engagement ring. Two months later he turned pro.

There was no good reason to think that Arnold could make money at it. The previous year Lew Worsham—older brother of Arnold's Wake Forest roommate, Bud—won two events and finished first on the money list with $34,002. Arnold couldn't know how his game would stack up. The gods of the circuit, Hogan and Nelson and Snead, played a different game from Palmer. They kept the ball in front of them. They plotted. Hogan, particularly, was a thinker. He played chess on a 150-acre board.

Arnold played muscular, slashing golf that was far more suited to match play, the amateur game, than the seventy-two-hole stroke-play events the pros typically played. (
Go for broke
was not yet a phrase of golf, nor the name of one of Arnold's many books.) To make it, Arnold would have to improve, and improving in professional golf is exceedingly difficult. You have to make a series of good decisions and compensate for your bad ones. Still, the Wilson Sporting Goods Co. of Chicago was willing to put Arnold on its staff and give him Wilson Staff irons and a set of woods, a golf bag, and boxes of mushy Wilson Staff balls, and to sign him to a modest deal. Arnold drove to Miami with his father to play in his first professional tournament, the Miami Springs Open. “And at the tournament I ran into a model that I knew from Chicago,” Arnold said. “And she was a good-looking broad.”

The phrase
good-looking broad
, by the way, does not appear in
A Golfer's Life
.

“And I'm engaged now to Winnie. I was out with the model that evening, and I got back to the hotel where my dad was. And it was late.

“He said, ‘Where in the hell have you been?'

“My father was tough. He was no patsy. And I told him I had run into this lady.

“My father says, ‘Arnie, you're engaged. You make up your mind. Are you going to play the tour? Are you going to quit screwing around? Where's your fiancée?'

“I said, ‘She's in Coopersburg.'

“He said, ‘Well, you get your ass up there and get her and get going on what you're going to do.'

“I said, ‘What do you mean?'