A Golfer's Life (49 page)

I’ll always cherish that moment.

Perhaps it goes without saying at this point, but I’ll always cherish Bay Hill, too.

L
et me tell you about a very special evening I recently experienced in New York. As memorable nights go, this one was almost as painful as it was wonderful.

The occasion was the world debut of a Golf Channel documentary on my life called
Arnold Palmer: Golf’s Heart and Soul
. If the title of the film alone wasn’t enough to make me an emotional basket case, the news we received on the eve of our departure for the screening and big reception certainly was. The day before the festivities honoring my life got under way, we learned Winnie was suffering from peritoneal carcinoma.

To a person, we were all thunderstruck and terrified by the implications. My initial reaction was to cancel our trip to the debut party and get Winnie to the cancer specialists in Orlando as quickly as possible, but Winnie’s cooler head prevailed (as it almost always seems to) in the crisis. She insisted that I go on to New York and do my duty to be with our good friends, many of whom had come a great distance to be there, and to say thank you to Joe Gibbs and his talented people at The Golf Channel who’d spent more than two years putting together the documentary.

I’ve had many memorable evenings as a public figure, but this one was right up at the top in terms of its emotional impact on me. I’m sure most of the folks I spoke to and shook hands with afterward at the reception were under the impression that my visibly subdued mood was due to the powerful tribute of the documentary, a beautifully wrought piece of filmmaking that did indeed leave me short of words and brought tears to my eyes on several occasions. Of course, they couldn’t know that, try as I might, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting elsewhere, to thoughts of Winnie and the life we’d made for ourselves. It was an evening made for reflection, and seeing so many of those images from years past was bittersweet at best. But I knew that other people were counting on me, and that Winnie would be unhappy if I didn’t put the best possible face on. So I tried to focus on the good and let the rest go—for a time.

That the premiere should come only days after Joe and his staff announced that The Golf Channel was about to reach the milestone of its 24 millionth subscriber was icing on the cake—and made the occasion even more meaningful for me. It amazed me to think that it had been less than a decade since the afternoon Joe and I met at the Birmingham Airport in Alabama to discuss his personal dream of a television cable channel devoted exclusively to the coverage of golf and its many aspects.

Joe had convinced me then that the concept had real potential and had asked for my help. A short time later, I enthusiastically signed on as chairman of the new enterprise and promised to lend my name and use my influence wherever it was proper with folks inside and outside the golf world. I also hoped I could attract prospective sponsors to help get that dream off the ground. Start-ups of any kind are tough. In those first years, I must admit, convincing people to share our vision of The Golf Channel wasn’t the easiest selling job.
Quite a few people in the television industry and even the golf world itself ridiculed the idea and flatly predicted we would go broke in no time flat, stating that programming devoted to golf twenty-four hours a day just wouldn’t fly. No matter who the pilots were.

Obviously they didn’t know Job Gibbs. The man has a southern preacher’s charms and a mongoose’s tenacity. Or maybe all those doubters simply underestimated the allure and drawing power of the history-rich game of golf. In any event, someday perhaps Joe will put his own pen to paper and tell the inside story of how The Golf Channel survived against the odds and finally thrived. Until then, you’ll have to take it from me that no human being ever worked harder or overcame more obstacles in his path than Joe Gibbs did to bring his dream to life.

That
my
life should be the focus of the channel’s first major documentary effort will always mean something very special to me and my family. For a number of reasons I had resisted previewing the film beforehand. Afterward I was so choked up by what I watched, I slipped into a quiet reflective daze that lasted the hour or so I lingered to shake hands at the reception.

Obviously, only a tiny handful of people really knew what was weighing so heavily on my mind that night. The fear of the unknown had never rattled me a bit on a golf course or in the business arena. For that matter even my own struggles against prostate cancer eventually settled into a personal challenge I was eager to confront and go for broke against. But when it comes to a member of my own family having to face an uncertain ordeal like cancer and its treatment, as we experienced with my daughter Amy and her frightening odyssey through the medical world a few years back, I realized all too clearly my own mortal limitations and the frustrations that come in facing them.

The very word “cancer” used in the same sentence as Winnie’s name struck cold terror in my heart. For if Arnold Palmer was supposed to be the Heart and Soul of Golf, as Joe and company’s lovely documentary described me, Winnie Palmer is surely the Heart and Soul of Arnold Palmer.

A
couple of weeks later, we returned to Latrobe from Bay Hill.

As is our daily habit, Winnie and I got up well before dawn and had breakfast together in the kitchen. I began my day as I always do, by exercising and then downing a quart of water as my grandmother used to do in order to get the plumbing properly functioning. Winnie seemed like her old self. Her treatment program was well under way and already showing promising results, and she was briskly arranging this clipping or that to dispatch to a friend (the woman reads at least half of everything published each week in the English language—books, magazines, speeches, and I’m only exaggerating a little bit), talking about our plans for the arrival of our grandchildren at the holidays just ahead, and shamelessly dropping hints that she wouldn’t mind having an early Christmas gift from me in the form of a new garden rototiller. It was nice to have some semblance of our ordinary life back.

A
s millions of you who have been down this road ahead of us know, though, you’re never quite the same after you’ve received news of cancer in your life. If nothing else, it deeply sharpens your powers of observation and makes you aware of and grateful for the small blessings you have all around you every minute and every day.

After breakfast, I put on my favorite old red alpaca sweater, and Prince, our golden retriever, and I strolled up the hill to
my office, passing beneath towering evergreens that once upon a time my little girls and I planted. Those trees now are nearly fifty feet high, standing vigil like giants in some child’s book of fairy tales. And now my little girls have little girls—who themselves are almost no longer little girls—of their very own.

Amazing how it has all gone so swiftly.

I let myself into the office, and while Prince went off to find one of the stuffed animals he’s forever carrying around, I went straight into my workshop to finish making a new set of irons I was anxious to take to the golf course later that morning. I love being in the office before Gina, Debbie, and Doc arrive to start the day. It gives me time to be alone with my thoughts, work on clubs, think about the day ahead—or not think about it, as the case may be. This particular morning, however, Cori Britt was there already doing something. Cori is our staff “jack-of-all-trades,” who does everything from keeping the copy machine filled to wrestling with Prince. He’s the kind of young man I like, a bright, optimistic local kid who went to work for us years ago around the grounds and the house, graduated from St. Vincent College in Latrobe, then returned to work for us, literally learning the business from the ground up. Our office accountant, Bob Demangone, followed the same route. They’re fine young men, hometown boys in the best sense of the word, and I’m pleased they work for me.

If it sounds a little like I was taking inventory of the things I love, I suppose I was—and am. It would be a shame, it seems to me, not to pause and acknowledge the things and the people that have made my life so genuinely rewarding, my days so full. My father used to say that this life would pass so quickly it would make your head spin, and, you know what? He was right about that. This life, my life, has done just that.

A few days before the Golf Channel documentary party, I’d had the good fortune to shoot a round of 63 at Latrobe. That wasn’t quite as sensational as the 60 I fired in a casual round back in 1969, but it got the office phones ringing with wire service reporters on the other end, wondering if Arnold Palmer had maybe found the fountain of youth.

The answer was, no, I hadn’t. But it was nice to post that kind of number again, and my effort reminded me that I
still
feel in my heart that, given the right combination of rest, equipment, and mental preparation, I could compete with the flatbellies of the PGA Tour.

I’ll admit that I sometimes fantasize about how great it would be to win a tournament, any tournament, one more time. In that sense, I’m not much different from the young man who spent most of his youth on the fairways of this place, his heart and his head filled with visions of heroic comebacks. If I were to win again, that would
really
make the office phones ring off the hook. At my age, wouldn’t that set the golf world on its collective ear? Frankly, I’d love nothing better than to have to face the tournament press corps after a most unexpected victory and field their questions. Knowing me—the almost seventy-year-old me, that is—I might even use the occasion to get a few things off my chest that have been chewing away at me for some time.

Please indulge me for a moment.

There are just a few observations I need to make, and they might seem incredibly trivial and unimportant to some people. But they certainly aren’t to me. They arise from lessons I learned as far back as my father’s own dinner table. They have to do with proper manners. And just because I choose to share them with you now instead of waiting till the next time I’m standing victorious in the press tent doesn’t mean I’m giving up believing that will happen. I’ll be hitting it hard, and then I’ll be off to find it to hit it hard again, believe you me.

A few days before our return to Latrobe, I hosted a luncheon gathering at Bay Hill, part of a charity golf outing to benefit the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women. The event drew a couple hundred enthusiastic participants, including a couple of well-known PGA Tour stars, and raised close to three quarters of a million dollars for the hospital, for which I was deeply grateful.

But as I prepared to sit down at the luncheon, I was dismayed to gaze across the function room at the club and see several men still wearing their golf caps as they sat down to eat.

To many, I’m sure this seems to be an incredible nitpick, a totally inconsequential matter in the overall scheme of things, but as I sat there it made me alternately sad and angry to think we now reside in an age in which intelligent and supposedly well bred men enter a building, encounter a woman, or come to someone’s dinner table still wearing their hats! To make matters worse, a well-known professional was preparing to take his seat just yards away from me, still wearing his cap with clearly no intention of removing it. It was apparent that the thought had not entered his head.

Luckily, or maybe not, one of the tournament’s directors sensed my acute discomfort and made an announcement that Bay Hill had a club policy of asking men to please remove their hats when indoors. One by one the hats came off, save for a stubborn few—including that of the famous Tour player, who apparently was so offended by the idea that somebody would consider it a sign of natural courtesy for him to remove his lid, he promptly got up and walked out of the luncheon in a sulk.

I thought about what had just happened for a few moments. I briefly felt bad about the situation, wondering if maybe I’m just a social dinosaur in this world to insist on such an old-fashioned courtesy. I promptly asked someone to go
catch the Tour player and inform him that he was invited to come back and continue wearing his cap, if he chose to. The sponsors wanted him there and I did, too. He did come back and took his seat for lunch, still wearing his cap. We chatted pleasantly as if nothing had happened, though deep inside I was irritated and amazed that a man of his stature in the game could have grown up in and around golf and, approaching age forty, be either so blithely ignorant of or unconcerned about the fundamentals of basic politeness.

Call me old-fashioned for saying this, but I happen to believe manners do count—knowing when to speak and what to say, knowing when to remove your hat as a sign of basic courtesy to the host of a home, knowing how to win by following the rules, knowing the importance of when and how to say thank you.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: golf resembles life in so many ways. I also happen to believe that golf, more than any game on earth, depends on simple timeless principles of courtesy and respect. I don’t think it’s by accident that golf is the most polite and well-mannered game on earth, a sport where every man or woman rises on the merits of his or her own skills and personal integrity, following rules that have remained essentially the same for the past five hundred years. What some players don’t seem to quite grasp is that golf’s enormous success can be attributed almost entirely to the fact that it hasn’t changed much in a world where values are constantly shifting or, as some believe, eroding.

Not removing your hat, even after being asked to do so, is symptomatic of larger ills that could threaten the game. That’s why I bother to tell this story.

The truth is, when I see modern stars of the game ignoring the basic fundamentals of personal courtesy or—worse—treating fans and even sponsors with indifference or disrespect, suggesting they simply feel entitled to the enormous
amounts of money, opportunity, and social prestige the game brings their way, I worry about the future of golf, because it means something vital is no longer being given back to the game and those who support it. It saddens me to no end when I realize many younger players don’t know the history of the game that gives them such rich and splendid lives, possess little appreciation of how and why the professional game has grown the way it has in the past fifty years, and have no apparent interest in understanding the important traditions of the game and perpetuating them. Ours is a game—and for that matter, ours is a nation—of such simple abundance I sometimes feel it’s downright criminal to take the many ordinary blessings we enjoy for granted. It’s my belief that we do so at our own peril.