A Golfer's Life (31 page)

“I am sorry, Monsieur Palmer,” the young woman in charge of tournament registration said to me, though she looked and sounded as if she was anything but sorry, “your entry has been … declined.”

I explained that there must be some big mistake—noting that our British writer friends, who urged us to come, had promised to arrange my entry into the tournament. I wasn’t alone in this pickle barrel. Gary Player was in the same situation though perhaps a bit less emotionally exercised about this ludicrous turn of events than I was at the moment. Were they really planning to turn away the current Masters and U.S. Open and former British Open winners? It would have been a laughable situation—if I hadn’t been growing angrier and angrier with each passing second. The more I pleaded our case, the more indifferent the woman seemed to our plight.

In a cold fury, I stalked into the dining room and growled to a startled Winnie, “Get your jacket. We’re
leaving
.”

“Where are we going?” she wondered, visibly dismayed. I think her appetizer had just arrived.

“Home to
America
!”

Poor Winnie. She’d really had her heart set on being footloose for a week in Paris, enjoying the shops, the museums, and all those glorious restaurants and cafés. Ten minutes later, we were perched side by side in the back of a taxi racing to Orly Airport to make an afternoon flight to New York. Her heart was broken, and I was still so mad I swore to her I’d be dead before I came back to the French Open! A couple years later, I’m happy to report, we did come back to Paris, to play in the Lancôme Trophy tournament, and Winnie got to shop and explore the City of Lights to her heart’s content. That’s where, among other things, I really got to
know the Duke of Windsor and we became pretty good friends. I never played in the French Open, though, and I promise you that for all the champagne and cheese in Paris I still never will!

O
n the heels of being selected both the Hickok Pro Athlete of the Year and
Sports Illustrated
Sportsman of the Year for 1960, two of my most cherished honors to this day, I suffered my first major collapse at Augusta that next spring of 1961, and posted a poor defense of my U.S. Open title at Oakland Hills in Birmingham, Michigan (I never broke 70 and wound up in twelfth place). In my mind, that made going to the 101st British Open at Royal Birkdale, on the Lancashire coast, all the more important. With the year suddenly slipping away, not only did I want to redeem myself for the poor showing in major events thus far, but the British Open and I had some unfinished business.

We arrived in Southport, a somewhat down-at-the-heels resort town even then, in possibly the worst spell of weather an Open had ever experienced. Certainly it was the worst
I’d
ever seen. Cold rain blew in gusty sheets off the Irish Sea, whipped by winds so fierce at times—reportedly seventy miles per hour in gusts—that not only did the tournament’s concession tents blow off their moorings but someone later said cases of ale were flying through the air like box kites.

Fortunately for me, once again I had Tip Anderson as my caddie and steadying influence in the gale-force winds that whistled through Birkdale’s high and ruggedly carved dunes. And my low, penetrating drives were of a tremendous advantage, because they kept my ball below the tops of dunes in many cases. Players who tended to hit high-flying shots saw their balls blown halfway to London. After once again being required to have to qualify because no automatic exemptions
were given—a situation that was really beginning to get under my skin, I must admit—I opened up with 70, highly respectable under the circumstances. Scores were almost as horrendous as the weather, and when I heard Gary Player was withdrawing because of “illness,” I passed along my condolences, telling him that I was sorry he was feeling so “under the weather.”

I shot 73 in the second round despite a seven at the 16th hole, where the wind was blowing so hard that it moved my ball after I’d taken my stance in a bunker and I had to call a penalty stroke on myself. It was one of the lowest rounds of the day and moved me ahead of everybody except Welshman Dai Rees, who had come close many times but never won the Open.

The wind was still howling when we resumed play on Friday under a threat to cancel the tournament by the Royal and Ancient Championship Committee if there were further interruptions. I felt really on top of my game, took the lead for good with a birdie at the first hole, and went out in 32, six better than anybody else that morning. Dai Rees fought gallantly back with a 71 and might have caught me if I hadn’t pulled off one of my best shots ever at the long 16th hole. My third shot to the par-5 hole nearly flew out of bounds to the right of the green, ending up in the thick and prickly gorse. I spotted a hole in the gorse, however, and somehow knocked the ball through the hole onto the putting surface, two feet shy of the cup. That salvaged par helped me to get home in 69, with a one-shot lead over Rees.

I didn’t do anything spectacular on the front nine of the final round and was out in 36, good enough for a four-stroke lead. As it turned out, I needed every one of those shots, because I finished 4, 5, 3, 4 to Dai Rees’s 3, 4, 3, 3 to win by a stroke. The moment that saved the tournament for me was
the par-4 I salvaged at the 15th, following one of the best pressure shots of my career. I pushed my tee shot a foot or so into the rough near a bush—or, as I like to tell it, my ball was deeper in the rough than it was off the fairway. Either way, it was an extremely difficult shot, and I knew pretty quickly that Tip wanted me to play smart and just use a wedge to get safely back onto the fairway.

I remember the look of horror he gave me when I declined the wedge and reached for a six-iron, intending to go for the green. The thing was, I could see the ball very clearly and reasoned that if I could get the clubface on the ball cleanly, I could get myself out of trouble. I swung as hard as I could, waited a second, and looked up, watching my ball soar high and settle on the putting surface up the hill, fifteen feet shy of the hole. The spectators massed there let out thunderous applause. Unfortunately, I failed to ice the cake there by missing the fairly easy uphill putt, leaving it just short.

I parred home to finish with a 72 and a total of 284 to edge Dai Rees by a stroke, becoming the first American to hoist the Claret Jug since Ben Hogan in 1953.

Winnie and I were both ecstatic, and I think our enthusiasm spread through the large galleries, who stayed to watch the presentation ceremony in the blustery winds. I was enormously pleased when I read how Henry Longhurst described the moment:

“It is doubtful that there was a man present at Birkdale who wanted Palmer to lose. It is impossible to overpraise the tact and charm with which this American has conducted himself on his two visits to Britain. He has no fancy airs or graces; he wears no fancy clothes; he makes no fancy speeches. He simply says and does exactly the right thing at the right time, and that is enough.”

It’s been said that my accomplishments at Birkdale helped
spark new American interest in the British Open Championship, which admittedly was suffering some from the absence of most of the top American players. If that’s so, I’m glad I could make a valuable contribution, because the British Open really is unlike any golf tournament in the world, and its place in the golf firmament, with its storied history and great traditions, was critical to the growth and development of the modern game.

After winning the Open, I took it upon myself, along with others, to quietly campaign with members of the sponsoring Royal and Ancient on the issue of the tournament’s maddening qualifying policy. I argued that if they granted exemptions to the top players of major events and championships, they would not only generate more interest among American players but probably attract even more of the world’s top players as well. I’m happy to say it was a policy they eventually changed after the 1964 event, and I think
that
may have had a dramatic effect in reviving international interest in the championship.

I made 1,400 pounds sterling for my win at Birkdale—or roughly about what it cost us to make the trip, exactly the kind of financial wash that would make old Sam Snead go fleeing to his backyard to make sure the money he had buried in a coffee can behind the stump pile was still safe.

For our part, win or lose, it seemed that a tiny splurge of some sort was called for. We’d reserved a nice hotel room at London’s Mayfair Hotel. After the presentation ceremony, with darkness falling, we hopped in a hired car with Wilson’s Tony Wheeler to drive the four or five hours back to London. That’s when the other memorable event of that week took place, one that Winnie and I still laugh about.

After driving a while, I suggested to Tony that we pull off the motorway for a bite to eat and a couple of beers. He spotted
an American-style fast-food place (which was a new phenomenon on British highways then) and we pulled over. We went in, got a table, and ordered some snacks and beers. Just about that time, a group of obnoxious motorcyclists flooded the place, a gang of young, scruffy guys in leather jackets, who began harassing patrons and the waitress. Tony leaned forward and explained that the tabloids had dubbed these nuisance bikers “Teddy Boys.” They were modern-day rebels without a cause, with no shortage of rude behavior.

I watched them carefully, and Winnie could tell that their outrageous conduct really bothered me. In fact, the part of me that had grown up in the Youngstown Fire Hall was almost itching for those Teddy Boys to come over and give us a hard time. Like Pap, I would have tried to clean them up a bit. But they didn’t come over, and we left a short time later to finish our drive to London.

Clearly, I still had those road punks on my mind, though, because when we checked into the hotel a few hours later and ordered a late-night supper of sandwiches, I confessed to Winnie that seeing those guys behave like that in public made me want to flatten their noses for good measure. She patted my hand and told me not to get myself too worked up—after all, I was the new British Open champion! So we brushed our teeth and climbed into bed.

I remember the dream quite well. We were still in that roadside pub when one of the Teddy Boys came over and began giving us a hard time. I was on him just like that …

“Arnie!” I heard a distant, alarmed voice calling. “Wake up, Arnie! You’re
choking
me!”

I opened my eyes and found to my shock that both my hands were gripping my bride’s lovely throat, her face wide-eyed in terror.

In the morning we laughed about it but agreed this was
one story we should keep from the British press. “After all,” Winnie observed, “they might have to write a story under the headline ‘New Open Champion Strangles Wife in Hotel.’ “

She had a point. We didn’t tell anybody but close friends about the incident for years.

N
o British Open golf course is easy, but as championship tests go, Troon Golf Club has always enjoyed the reputation of being a giant killer. Playing at just over 7,000 yards in length, indecently narrow in places, with postage stamp–size greens that are as bumpy and unpredictable as a Manhattan cab ride, fairways surrounded by clutching eruptions of gorse, broom, and impossibly tough whin bushes dotted with ruthlessly sheer sod bunkers and deep burns, it’s a tough and scary walk to par even on the calmest sunny day. It was at Troon in 1923 that Gene Sarazen, the cocky twenty-one-year-old U.S. Open champion, teed off as the wind began to howl. Four hours later, after a horrific 85, he packed up and headed for a long boat ride home to America.

In July 1962, as Winnie described in her note to Susie Bowman, the wind was blowing in classic Open style and the temperature was almost bone chilling those first few days after we arrived at Troon. She was correct in her assessment that I suddenly couldn’t make a putt to save my life—I seemed to be leaving everything hanging on the lip. On the eve of the tournament I even complained to a handful of reporters that my back hurt, my drives were straying woefully to the right, and I’d forgotten how to putt. All of that was true—though I suspect I still suffered from an Open “hangover”—having lost the Open playoff to Jack Nicklaus at Oakmont only weeks before. In any case, I pronounced my game “terrible,” but Sam Snead and the British bookmakers would have none of my grumbling. The bookies established
me as the favorite at 2-to-1 odds. Snead drawled that there wasn’t “anything wrong with old Arnie that a two-stroke lead won’t fix. He’s just trying to sweet-talk that tough old course into lying down and playing dead.”

Maybe it’s true that I was. But motive didn’t seem to matter, and the beginning of the week sure felt like a test for both Winnie and me. To begin with, the village of Troon, at least in those days, was a fairly isolated place with not much to do but either play golf or watch it being played. After greeting and dining with several of our British friends from the Royal and Ancient, there wasn’t a whole lot for Winnie to see and do except trek after me around the spare links at Troon in the company of the ever-wise-cracking Bob Drum, watching me shiver and scowl at putts that maddeningly wouldn’t drop.

If there was any consolation, it was that many of the field’s top players were having similar difficulties. Dai Rees, who’d lost to me by a stroke the year before at Birkdale, played miserably and missed the thirty-six-hole cut. The same thing happened to Gene Littler, the 1961 U.S. Open champ, and Gary Player, the ’61 Masters winner. The current U.S. Open champ, Jack Nicklaus, blew himself out of the tournament with a first-round 80. “An eighty!” he fumed in disbelief afterward. “It’s impossible. I can’t shoot an
eighty
.”

But he did, and so did plenty of others. I played my first round wearing flannel long johns beneath my clothes, my aching back liberally swabbed with liniment. That prescription enabled me to fire a 71, good enough for third place after the opening round. I remember telling Winnie and Drum afterward, though, that my putter was even colder than the weather.

The following day, my putter suddenly began to warm up, and I got around that narrow torture chamber with a three-under 69 that placed me two strokes ahead of a pack that seemed to be losing ground fast. Perhaps the signature shot
of that round, maybe the tournament itself, came at the daunting 485-yard 11th, which played dead into a stiff wind most of that week, where three players in the field had already scored sextuple bogeys and Jack made ten. I joked to somebody that the hole was “the worst hole I’ve ever seen,” and I was only half kidding around. It was a monster, a real widow maker—especially in the wind.