A Golfer's Life (21 page)

They laughed at this remark, already punching out wire stories and newspaper dispatches about how my “heroic” putting had once again saved the day at Augusta National. I suppose some of them thought I was kidding.

T
he Masters of 1962 was significant and perhaps even lucky for me in a couple far less visible but meaningful ways.
If you had been a part of the frenzied crowds following the playoff on Monday, you might have noticed a trim young fellow with a portable phone in hand, battling the galleries as they rushed from one vantage point to the next. His name was Donald Webster (“As in dictionary”) Giffin, but he was Doc to just about everybody on or around the Tour. Doc had just left his job that year as a sportswriter at the
Pittsburgh Press
to join the PGA Tour as its press secretary. His job that Monday was to phone in the hole-by-hole action on the course to the crowded pressroom, where wire-service reporters and writers sat poised on deadline.

Four years later, after admiring Doc’s hustle and organizational skills from afar, I spotted him crossing the empty grillroom of Rio Pinar at the old Florida Citrus Open (which eventually became the Bay Hill Invitational, by the way), where I was grabbing a bite alone and doing some hard thinking. I called him over and told him that the rapidly expanding demands of my work and family life were driving me a bit crazy. I explained that even with the capable business management of Mark McCormack and his various people, my personal affairs on the road and back home in Latrobe had become almost too much for both Winnie and me to manage ourselves. What I really needed was, in effect, a traveling secretary and somebody to run my home office, and Doc Giffin was the man I wanted to do it. He agreed to take the job, and after a couple of months spent breaking in Bob Gorham, his successor as press secretary, just after the PGA Championship at Firestone, he came on board with Arnold Palmer Enterprises.

I count that as one of the wisest choices I ever made. Ironically, on a sadder note, Doc’s arrival coincided with the death of one of the Tour’s newest stars, Tony Lema. Tony was killed in a plane crash while flying from Firestone to an exhibition in Chicago. Doc’s first duty as my assistant was to
phone me in Latrobe, where I’d just arrived by my own plane, to inform me of the tragedy.

The second change in my life that began to quietly manifest itself before the 1963 season was the realization that I probably should give up smoking on the golf course.

Much to Pap’s dismay, I’d smoked pretty heavily since about age fifteen, first secretly with my teenage school friends, and later, by the time I reached Wake Forest, on the golf course itself. Coming down the stretch of a tournament, I found there was nothing like an L&M cigarette to steady the nerves and help me concentrate on the business at hand. One of my first business contracts negotiated by Mark McCormack, fittingly, was a deal to represent Liggett & Myers cigarettes, which I happily did for several years, puffing furiously whenever I needed the crutch of nicotine. My cardinal rule for representing any commercial product on tour was that I had to genuinely believe in the value of the product I was endorsing. My two-pack-a-day addiction spoke powerfully to that belief.

But increasingly troubling to both Winnie and me were stories beginning to appear in the popular press about the terrible long-term health effects of cigarette smoking, particularly among people who took up the habit as teenagers. During the 1963 season, I tried off and on to kick the habit, but it wasn’t until the Surgeon General’s Office released its report in late 1963 or early 1964 officially linking cigarette smoking to various ailments, including heart disease and lung cancer, that I knew the writing was on the wall for my own two-pack habit.

Simultaneously, the letters I received from concerned parents and teachers and physicians urging me to abandon my own “glamorous” addiction cinched the deal. I hated to think I could somehow be responsible for thousands of kids picking up golf clubs
and
cigarettes. Even my friend President
Eisenhower advised me in no uncertain terms to kick the habit, and both he and Pap expressed their strong relief when I finally promised to try.

When my contract with L&M expired, I decided to go “cold turkey”—at least on the golf course. That proved easier said than done, and though I only slipped up and smoked publicly during a golf tournament on American shores once or twice more, my battle against addiction to coffin nails went on behind the scenes, painfully at times, for many years yet. In fact, it wasn’t until a Christmas party at Bay Hill in 1970 that I kicked the awful habit for good. Then, on a wager with eleven other friends—including Dow Finsterwald, a non-smoker who suddenly took to wildly puffing cigarettes just to get into the wagering pool—we agreed that all of us would kick the habit for good or else pay the others in the pool $100 each for falling off the wagon.

I’ve never touched a cigarette since, and friends still debate the effect quitting had on my career.

Even so, by the end of 1962, the year I quietly
began
to quit smoking on tour, I was the Tour’s leading money winner, with $81,448 in official prize money and nine wins, which included consecutive victories at Texas, the Tournament of Champions, and Colonial. The year’s major highlights were my second British Open championship title, at Royal Troon, and a devastating playoff loss—before what amounted to a hometown crowd at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh in the United States Open Championship—to a sensational Tour rookie who possessed a game for the ages and no visible fear in him. But I’ll get to him in just a bit.

Approaching the Masters of 1963, I suppose I really was a bit mentally and physically weary, and maybe just dying for a cigarette or two when I played. My tournament and business life was booming and the media focus on my family was at its all-time high. We never had an unlisted phone number in
Latrobe, and as a result, the telephone would ring at all hours of the night, with people calling and asking to speak to me, convey their best wishes, ask for favors, borrow money, sell something, you name it. I always tried my best to be courteous to people, to treat them the way I wanted to be treated, but honestly at times it made me wonder if the privacy you sacrifice for fame and fortune is really worth it.

As I think of those hectic days, looking at old cover stories on my career in
Time
and
Sports Illustrated
and a host of others, it seems to me that someone from the national press was always camped out at our house or staying at the nearby Mountain View Inn, dining with us, probing our family life, asking us to pose for pictures planting a family Christmas tree or taking a ride with my daughters on Pap’s old tractor (the same one you see in Pennzoil commercials). Winnie, for her part, was good-natured about the constant intrusions on our family life but clearly had her limits and, thankfully, knew how to say no whenever I couldn’t or simply promised too much. Watching all the reporters around me, Amy, who was born in Augusta in 1958 and was almost five, wondered to her mother, “Why does Daddy always have all those detectives asking him questions?”

From the mouths of babes …

At moments, as a result of these intense distractions, both on and off the course, when I felt my concentration beginning to waver and the tournament slipping away from me, I’ll freely admit there would have been nothing better to soothe my jangled nerves than a long drag on a cigarette, but there was no way to go back on my pledge. As a result, I eventually put on weight—as much as fifteen pounds at one point—but on the positive side of the ledger I started fast in 1963 by taking the L.A. Open, a tournament I always dearly hungered to win but in which I had never done particularly well. I followed
that good fortune up with victory laps at Phoenix and Pensacola and top ten finishes at Palm Springs and Doral.

I was thirty-four years old, the traditional peak of a Tour player’s performance years, with forty-two professional wins in my column, and it stood to reason that I was the logical favorite to win my fourth green jacket at Augusta. But it simply wasn’t in the cards for me that year. From the start, I felt uncomfortable—a rare circumstance for me at Augusta—and nothing I tried short of lighting up could fix the problem. I opened with a shaky 74, failed to summon the kind of concentration I always needed in order to contend, and finished a distant ninth with 291.

That Masters belonged to a history maker named Jack. In a very real sense, though I perhaps didn’t fully appreciate it at that moment, I was suddenly staring at the future and my greatest rival in the game. Nicklaus, then twenty-two, the Tour rookie who beat me in a playoff in front of the rowdy home crowd at Oakmont nine months before, fired 286 to beat a hard-charging Tony Lema by a stroke in his first Masters, to become the youngest man in history to win the Masters. I remember slipping the green jacket onto Jack and smiling as he presented Bob Jones with his winning ball. It was an emotional moment, admittedly bittersweet for me, and I know neither Jack nor I have ever forgotten it.

Jack Nicklaus had come of age, and professional golf would never be the same. You could almost feel that in the air. I’d known Jack since we first met at an exhibition match in Athens, Ohio, in 1956. The event was “Dow Finsterwald Day,” and Jack was a muscular, somewhat pudgy sixteen-year-old who even then could slug the ball farther than most professional Tour players. I remember that just for fun we had a driving contest and I beat him by a hair; I made a mental note on the spot to always keep an eye on this upstart kid,
because with his skills and eerie composure under fire it was probably only a matter of time before he was giving us all a run for the prize money and tournament hardware.

And now that fate had come to pass. As if taking a U.S. Open trophy out from under me and my Army at Oakmont wasn’t enough, Jack Nicklaus now had the temerity to stroll onto the hallowed grounds of Augusta National as a Tour sophomore and simply lay waste to the course in a devastating display of shotmaking not seen in that part of Dixie since a fellow named Sherman made his way from Atlanta to Savannah.

In all seriousness, if there was ever a course that was built to suit Jack’s power-fade game, it was Augusta National. The way that he made his mark on the place, not to mention the game itself, so convincingly in 1963 stands as one of the great stories in golf this century. But, as I keep saying, more on him—and us—in a bit.

Curiously, a few of the same observers who only a year or so before had predicted that I would win seven or eight Masters titles now openly wondered if I had reached my peak of performance and would probably begin a slow decline. I suppose thanks to Jack it may have looked as if I was contemplating early retirement, but nothing could have been further from the truth. In the first five months of 1963, Jack won a couple of tournaments I’d won the previous year, prompting some wag in
Time
to reflect, “Whatever Arnie wants, Jack gets.” Doug Sanders, the flamboyant one, commented to the press that “Baby Beef” (his name for Jack) was doing to me what I’d been doing to the rest of the PGA Tour for several years.

The truth is, for the first time in my career, I was nagged by an inability to mentally focus the way I had been able to do. As a result, my putting stats declined and even my drives lost some of their customary zip. Because of these problems,
combined with an unexpected bursitis pain in my shoulder, I decided to do something I would previously never have considered doing at the height of the tournament season. I decided to take a month off. I went home to Latrobe and hung around the office, went swimming with the girls, and just basically tried to rest up for the U.S. Open at Brookline. The rest clearly did me good. A week before the Open, I beat Paul Harney in a sudden-death playoff to win the Thunderbird and went on to Brookline feeling like my old self, fashioning good enough golf to make a playoff with Julius Boros and Jacky Cupit. The popular story is that a stomach bug cost me a second Open championship title (I fired a miserable 76 in the playoff, and it’s true I did feel woozy at times), but the real culprit was a foolish attempt to hit my ball from a tree stump. That’s what cost me a chance to win in regulation.

Despite my roller-coaster ups and downs that year, counting a victory at the Australian Wills Masters and my team victory with Nicklaus in the Canada Cup, I collected nine wins on tour, six top tens, and enough prize money—$128,230—to make me, once again, the Tour’s leading money winner. Not to put too fine a point on it—for a man some feared was in decline—becoming the first player to break the $100,000 earnings barrier that year was the kind of “decline” most players would hope for. Still, what weighed most heavily on my mind, and everyone else’s, was that I hadn’t won a major golf tournament in 1963.

Against that backdrop, Winnie and I arrived at our rental house off Berckmans Road in Augusta in 1964 with more than a little resolve churning in my gut to make up for my poor performance at the previous Masters. During a week of nearly perfect spring weather, the press wrote glowing accounts about the “Big Three of Golf”—Gary, Jack, and me—seeming to imply that the winner of the $20,000 first-place check and accompanying jacket was a foregone conclusion.
One of us was bound to win it, and the serious betting was on Jack, the defending champion, as it probably should have been. That was fine with me, because one thing I’d finally begun to realize was that I almost always played sharper and more consistent golf when cast in the underdog role.

I was as determined as I’d ever been that Jack wasn’t going to get the 1964 Masters, and I suppose some of my Army was, too. That year, and the year preceding it, our rivalry was plagued by a few unfortunate incidents where overzealous Palmer fans, in a foolish attempt to somehow boost their hero’s chances, expressed themselves in a most unsportsmanlike manner. The worst instances came from among the hometown partisans at Oakmont in ’62—as I’ll talk about later. Needless to say, Clifford Roberts wanted no part of such shenanigans at
his
golf tournament and rightly responded in 1964 by printing an expected code of spectator conduct on the back of every Masters pairing sheet, as is done to this day.