Men in Green (5 page)

“He says, ‘You take the car and go get Winnie and decide what you want to do.'

“So I went to Coopersburg and four days later I was married. We went to Washington, where my sister was, got a marriage license, and got married. We came here for the holidays.”

Christmas in Latrobe, 1954. Their honeymoon night was spent at a motel for truckers off the Breezewood exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Get your ass up there
. People my age and younger don't even know how to use the word
ass
anymore, but older people do. My father, the least vulgar of men and the most encouraging of fathers, once criticized my boyhood leaf-raking with “That's a half-assed job.” Today a parent who dares to be critical is shunned during the cookie portion of parent-teacher night. The real truth is that my father wasn't being critical. He was teaching me something. Arnold's father, the same. Deacon Palmer didn't care how good-looking that Chicago model was.

I asked Arnold about earlier girlfriends, if he had ever been close to getting married before meeting Winnie.

“Well, I fucked a few,” Arnold said. “But I never wanted to marry them.”

Arnold was going off-script. He knew he was not portraying himself as a saint. But he was doing something better and more useful. He was telling a story that was actually believable. I think he wanted us to know the real story of when Arnie met Winnie. For our benefit, for yours, and for his own, too. You know what they say: The truth will set you free.

•  •  •

In his own way, Arnold expressed a deep love for his life with Winnie.

He said, “Winnie did what I wanted to do. She worked with me all the time. She didn't mind if I was practicing. And I practiced a lot. She came and watched me. And it was great.”

Okay, Winnie was in a subservient role, no question about that. But in 1954 nobody was talking about feminism, at least not within the confines of the mainstream American marriage. My parents, I'm sure, had about the same setup. In 1954
Father Knows Best
had just come on TV; Gloria Steinem, Winnie's age exactly, was an undergraduate at Smith; and Mr. and Mrs. Arnold D. Palmer were conjoined by elopement.

And it was great
.

Would Winnie have said the same? We can't know. Different answers at different times, in all likelihood. As in any marriage. Right then, Arnold was remembering their early days when they shared a dream known only to them, the road in front of them was wide open, and anything seemed possible.

•  •  •

Christmas 1954 segued into the new year and the start of his rookie season. Arnold told us how he and Winnie started traveling the tour in a four-door Ford, lugging a trailer behind them. The first trailer, which died young, was nineteen feet long. The next model was a twenty-seven-footer, a home on wheels that toured all of California and the west, crossed the country to Florida, migrated north from there to Augusta. For nearly four months, everything Arnie and Winnie did, they did in that trailer.

“After Augusta we came home, right here to Latrobe, and pulled that trailer in my father's backyard and parked it,” Arnold said. “And Winnie looked at me and said, ‘You know how much I love you. I'll do anything you want to do. But I will never go with you in a trailer again.' ”

There was a beautiful portrait of Winnie on a nearby wall, her hair swooped back. She looked like a Breck Girl.

“The trailer never went again.”

Arnold looked right at us. The silver hair, the massive head, the creased face. This was not cocktail chatter. It was his life.

•  •  •

I was struck by Arnold's coarse, plain language, by its Rat Pack cool and economy. His golf ball was “that son of a bitch.” The old pro Dutch Harrison, a gambler, got Arnold into a big-bucks pro-am and wanted a “kickback.” The Hall of Famer Tommy Bolt “was
so
bad.” A double-date fishing trip with Bolt and his wife, Shirley, ended with the two of them “throwing knives at each other” and Arnold saying to Winnie, “Babe, we gotta split.” On the road out, they saw Bolt's own son “thumbing.” Regarding the successful Latrobe lumberman for whom Palmer had caddied as a kid: “I hung close.” He called himself “dumber than a rock.” (Fat chance.) When he made money in a Calcutta gambling game, he was “as happy as a dog going to a farting contest with six assholes.” His great college friend Bud Worsham was a “bad drinker” and Arnold had to “pull him out of ditches.” (Bud, along with a Wake Forest basketball player, died in a late-night car accident when Arnold was a senior.) Arnold got his “ass kicked” on the course by so-and-so. He remembered Bobby Jones once telling him, “If I ever need an eight-foot putt for my life, you're going to putt it.”
For my life
. They played for high stakes.

Mike asked Arnold if there was a party in Latrobe after he won his first tour event, the 1955 Canadian Open.

“No,” Arnold said. “It was quiet.”

You can see clips from that win in the Arnold Palmer Room at the USGA museum in the New Jersey horse country. It also has home movies of Arnold, Arnold doing a Pennzoil ad, Arnold holing out on the eighteenth green on Sunday at Augusta in '58, when he won the first of his four titles there. You can see skinny Ken Venturi on the green with him, warmly congratulating him. The scene, in black and white, has a certain timeless grace.

Mike and I sat there listening to Arnold checking off all these old names. I knew most of them, and Mike knew every last one. Dutch Harrison, Dick Mayer, Tommy Bolt, Billy Casper. Ky Laffoon, Porky Oliver. Gene Littler. Hogan and Nelson and Snead. The Worsham brothers and Skip Alexander. (Mike played golf for his son, Buddy Alexander, at Georgia Southern.) Ed Furgol. Harvie Ward. Fred Hawkins. Al Besselink. Mike and I once spent half a day with Besselink, a tour star from the fifties with a loaf of yellow hair. Bessie was a habitué of the South Florida golf scene but also well known at the betting windows at Gulfstream and Hialeah. Mike had been quoting for years something Bessie told us that day: “Don't date no brokes.”

“I'll never forget this,” Arnold said. “Winnie and I are driving from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. We're watching the car in front of us. All of a sudden sparks are coming out of the back of that car. I'm watching. And I thought,
I'm seeing something that I don't understand
.

“I pulled up closer to them and there's Besselink hanging out of the back door of the car, grinding a wedge on the highway. That's what the sparks were.”

You could see it like it was in a movie.

“It really happened,” Arnold said.

“Al Besselink's a crazy man,” Mike said.

“Oh, shit,” Arnold said in casual agreement.

•  •  •

Arnold's wealth is vast. In 2000 he was worth over $300 million, despite earning only $4.4 million on the regular and senior tours over a fifty-year career. But Pennzoil loved him, and so did, at various times, Hertz, Rolex, Wilson, Callaway, Ketel One, Arizona Beverage, Lamkin grips, the Bay Hill Club & Lodge,
Golf
magazine,
Golf Digest
, Random House, Cessna, United Airlines, Sears, various auto dealers in Charlotte and Orlando and Latrobe, Golf Channel, and the long list of developers who hired Arnold as a course architect.

That list barely scratches the surface. It also included Toro (lawn mowers), Robert Bruce (clothing), Paine Webber (money). Plus Palmer's forays into dry-cleaning and golf-club manufacturing and, less significantly, a product called Arnold Palmer Foot Detergent. You can still find Arnold Palmer Indoor Golf, stepbrother of Bobby Hull Hockey, at your better yard sales. In that game, the toy Arnold takes the club back shut, just as the real Arnold did. Hogan hated that move.

Mike has an abiding interest in money. He's tried, with some success, to teach me about option trading, but it was work. Arnold is more like Mike. When he talked about money—the cost of his first house, the size of his first tour check, the expense of his first engagement ring—he was always precise. Mike was hanging on every word. One of his tests for character is how people spend and save their money.

“At what point did you buy your first home?” Mike asked.

Arnold's answer took him straight to Ed Anderson, the successful Latrobe lumberman he caddied for, who gradually raised Arnold's rate from a quarter to a half-dollar to a dollar. No wonder Arnold hung close.

“I said to him, ‘Mr. Anderson, I'd like to buy some land from you.' This was in '56.

“He said, ‘Where's that, Arnie?'

“I said, ‘Across the road from the course.'

“He said, ‘You can't afford that land.'

“I said, ‘Yeah, well, I'd like to try to buy it.'

“He said, ‘I'll sell you enough for a house.' ”

Mr. Anderson sold just under two acres to Arnold. Nearly sixty years later that land was still home to the original Arnold-and-Winnie rancher, the new home where Arnold lived with Kit, and Arnold's suite of offices at the end of Legends Lane. It was all impressively modest. It was right out of the Warren Buffett playbook.

Living within one's means happens to be a central tenet of Mike's life. You don't even want to hear him on the subject of young tour players with one or two wins who fly on private jets and live in coastal mansions with his-and-her Land Rovers on their Belgian block driveways. He knows what they don't: Someday they will stop making short putts.

Mike asked Arnold, “At what point did you feel secure, that you knew you were going to be a professional golfer for an extended period of time?”

Mike once told me that he turned pro “to avoid getting a real job.” When he was starting out, he never expected he'd be able to make a living from his play.

“I never took that attitude,” Arnold said. “I always remained very money-conscious.” He never allowed himself to feel secure. He never allowed himself to think he was set for life.

They were comparing notes, pro to pro. The scale of achievement was different but the similarities were considerable.

Arnold talked about the old tour apprentice rules, by which a player had to wait six months before he could cash his first check. Mike knew about that system, but he was appalled all over again.

“Six months!” Mike said.

Arnold made a sad nod.

Mike then told Arnold about a prominent pro with a massive house in foreclosure, a player who'd had some excellent years and endorsement deals worth tens of millions of dollars. Arnold was all ears.

He asked, “Where is that money?”

•  •  •

Arnold has two grandsons. One, Sam Saunders, grew up at Bay Hill and was in his mid-twenties. Sam had a good college golf career at Clemson and played some on the PGA Tour, often on sponsors' exemptions with Arnold's fingerprints on them. Most of Sam's professional golf has been on the Web.com tour, golf's answer to Class AAA ball. There could not have been a thousand golfers in the world who were better than Sam, but every year new ones come into the pro game and existing ones try to figure out ways to hang on. The game is actually vicious. Sam could make it on tour, but the odds are long. You have to make many smart decisions about your swing and whom to trust with it, what clubs to play, how and when to practice, whom to hire as your caddie, when to take dead aim, when to lay up. You can get all sorts of advice in golf, but when you're standing over your ball you're all alone.

Arnold's other grandson, Will Wears, was in high school. Arnold described him as the best player on his school team, breaking 80 regularly and showing interest in the game.

Arnold spent many hours with both grandsons. Will was living near Latrobe, and Arnold said he wanted golf instruction from his grandfather. Mike asked about Sam. Was he getting from Arnold the kind of golf and life lessons Arnold received from his father?

There was a longish pause before Arnold answered. It was his first cautious moment with us.

“It's a little different; I'm not his father,” Arnold said.

Profound.

•  •  •

Before our day in Latrobe was over, Arnold turned himself into a tour guide. “Have you ever been inside the house?” he asked.

We shook our heads.

“Well, I'll show it to you.”

For the first time we could see Arnold's age. With every step he took, his shoulders listed to one side and then the other.

The first stop on the house tour was in front of a gentle landscape painting given to Arnold for his thirty-seventh birthday in 1966 by its painter, Dwight Eisenhower.

It was a mountain house, really, sturdy and handsome. Mike said, “It's a house where you can tell people actually live.” There was almost nothing golfy in it except the family dog, a golden retriever named Mulligan.

“Where's Mommy?” Arnold asked Mulligan.

Kit, who designed the house, came in, shook hands with us, and said to me, “Nice to meet you.”

Arnold said, “You've met Michael before.”

We had met, but it had been years earlier. I don't know how Arnold could have remembered. His ability to make people comfortable is astounding.

Arnold took us through the house. The tour concluded in his master bathroom. It was not ornate. No gold anything. Just a nice bathroom with a deep tub. Arnold showed it with pride. You can probably guess how it compared to the loo from his Depression-era boyhood home or even to the one in the rancher he shared with Winnie. That master bathroom was paid for, when you get right down to it, by his skill in golf. Everything in his life followed from that. You could tell Arnold knew that and never forgot it, not even for a minute.

•  •  •

Earlier, Arnold had taken us into his workshop, near his office. In the workshop were hundreds of golf clubs and an elaborate painting that a fan had sent, diagraming every shot Arnold hit en route to winning the 1961 British Open at Royal Birkdale.