Men in Green (6 page)

“When I get pissed off at everybody, I come in here and work on the clubs,” Arnold said. “Not as much as I used to, but I still do.”

Next to the workshop was his airplane room, with models and photographs of the eleven planes he has owned. In 1976 Arnold made it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
by circumnavigating the globe in a Lear 36 in about fifty-eight hours. When he spoke of his planes he sounded like he was in his fifties again, when he was winning (on the senior tour), Peggy and Amy were out of the house, Winnie was busy with her stuff (hospital philanthropy), and Arnold could go just about anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted. What freedom.

Arnold kept a pilot's license for fifty-five years and had given it up only recently. He told us about a “dogfight” he once had over the Atlantic with another civilian pilot, each in an F-15 borrowed from the United States Air Force. I didn't know you could borrow planes from the United States Air Force. Arnold said that was his fee for giving a clinic at the Langley Air Force Base golf course. “I threw up all over myself,” Arnold said. “I'm just being honest.”

•  •  •

Arnold's docent work concluded in the office lobby, where his presidential collection was assembled. The people at the World Golf Hall of Fame must have fantasies about it: filled scorecards, golf balls, clubs, bag tags, all connected to the many golf games and White House visits Arnold has had with many of the twentieth century's First Duffers.

Palmer hadn't met Obama and he never met Kennedy. He and JFK had a Palm Beach golf game in the works for Christmastime 1962 but it got canceled when Kennedy's back went out. Kennedy didn't forget. In the summer and early fall of '63, he had the White House photographer, Cecil Stoughton, shoot sixteen-millimeter film of his swing, with the intention that Palmer would come to the White House, review the footage, and offer the former Harvard golfer (freshman team) some tips. Then came November 22.

The film was buried in a vault at the Kennedy Library until a reporter on Cape Cod uncovered it. Many years too late to help the man, Arnold analyzed JFK's stylish, relaxed swing. In one round Kennedy is wearing pink pants and Ray-Bans and his shirttail is out. He looks like a preppy movie producer on vacation. The caddies are skinny teenagers in country-boy dungarees and white T-shirts they borrowed from James Dean. The motorized golf carts have three wheels. Jackie is in the background now and again. A few years earlier I had watched the film with Arnold. He said, “Look at Jackie—she's smoking!” Arnold's own war with cigarettes went on for years. His eye for pretty women never diminished.

Near a corner of the lobby was a golf bag stuffed with Eisenhower's clubs. A wall was dotted with presidential photos, spanning nearly a half century. One showed Arnold playing with Jerry Ford. They're cracking up about something. “He was my buddy,” Arnold said. Deacon Palmer was a Roosevelt Democrat, but Arnold, like a lot of golfers, checked in early with the Grand Old Party and stayed there. There was a photo of Kissinger on a sofa with Pat Nixon and Dolores Hope. They all look sort of stuffed. The whole lobby was like a tribute to a lost world. “Jerry Ford's turning golf into a contact sport,” Bob Hope used to say. Who's writing golf jokes today?

Arnold told us about a round he played recently with Bill Clinton at a course called Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley, in New York. Mike and I played there once with Trump, who played well but didn't stop talking. I lost a dozen balls and came off the eighteenth green with a throbbing headache. I found aspirin in the locker room, where Trump's locker sits in a row with others bearing shiny nameplates for Rudy Giuliani, Joe Torre, and Lou Rinaldi, a scratch player and Trump's pavement guy. Trump made Clinton an honorary member of the club.

“Clinton can play a little bit,” Palmer said. “But he hits this one shot that goes way right. A wild shot. He looks at me with this shit-eating grin and says, ‘I promise you: You'll never see me go that far right again.' ”

•  •  •

Not even a mile from Arnold's office is a giant warehouse that Arnold calls the barn. (Simplicity is one of Arnold's chief gifts.) Arnold's brother, Jerry, thirteen years younger and the former superintendent of the Latrobe course, gave Mike and me a tour. Evidently, Arnold's mother couldn't throw out anything, and Arnold was the same way. There were scores of bag tags, thousands of clubs, hundreds of books, boxes and boxes of photos, canister after canister of network film from various tournaments, the antique tractor from a famous Pennzoil ad, dozens of artworks sent to him by fans, and more leather golf shoes than you'd want to count.

“This can't be every pair of golf shoes he's ever had, can it?” I asked.

“I'm not sure,” Jerry said.

“It probably is!” Mike said.

Mike loved Palmer. Being in that barn was like touring the Louvre for Mike. Jerry thought Mike was the first tour player to see it.

“You figure three, four pair a year, for fifty years, this could be
all
of them,” Mike said. He picked up a shoe. “You know what I like? You feel how heavy this shoe is? It just seems like everything they made then had more quality.”

“The amazing thing,” Jerry said, “is that we could bring Arnold in here and he could tell you what shoes he wore at what tournament.”

“Unbelievable,” Mike said, responding not really to Jerry but to his awe at the whole scene. He picked up an old iron and said, “Look at these irons. Would you look at them?”

The irons were old Wilson Staffs, the forebears of the club Mike used when he nearly won the U.S. Open. I looked at them. They looked tiny, obsolete—beautiful.

•  •  •

The warehouse tour was the final thing we did before leaving Latrobe, but for this report I have saved lunch for last. We ate in the Latrobe Country Club grillroom. Arnold introduced Mike to the clubhouse manager as “the guy Hale Irwin beat in the U.S. Open. They had a playoff.”

Arnold is an expert on the subject of losing U.S. Open playoffs. He had been defeated by Nicklaus at Oakmont near Pittsburgh in the '62 playoff, by Julius Boros at the Country Club in Brookline in '63, and by Billy Casper at Olympic in San Francisco in '66. In Arnold's day, the Masters was charming and clubby and genteel, and Arnold won it four times. In more recent years, it has become the prized jewel of golf events. It gives its winners something money cannot buy: the ultimate golf time-share, complete with a parking space near the clubhouse and a green sport coat to wear inside it. But for Arnold, for Mike, for any American touring pro who grew up in a less cushy time, the national open will always be more important. They belonged to a country-first generation and they welcomed the tournament's extreme challenge. It's a modest link between Mike and Arnold that they both know what it's like to lose a U.S. Open in a playoff. But it's significant.

We sat at a round table, Arnold, Kit, Doc, Mike, me, and Pete Luster, Arnold's pilot. I ordered an Arnold Palmer. I've seen Arnold have a martini at lunch, or a beer or a glass or two of wine, but on this day he ordered a Coke Zero. Mike was paying attention. He was going to order whatever Arnold ordered.

We talked about the Congressional Gold Medal that Arnold had just received and made a list of the five other athletes who had received it. Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Byron Nelson came readily. The fifth name was elusive for a minute until Doc remembered it: Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who died while doing relief work for earthquake victims.

We talked about the results of the World Golf Hall of Fame voting and whether Fred Couples deserved his spot. Arnold said he had voted for him. That led me to ask Arnold how he would compare Tiger and Fred, just for pure golf talent. Many knowledgeable people, like Mike, will argue that nobody has ever hit a higher percentage of flush shots than Fred.

“That's very difficult for me to tell you about,” Arnold said. “Let me think about it some.”

I figured it was a topic that, for whatever reason, Arnold didn't want to get into. We moved on to other things. The Ryder Cup. Kit and Arnold's annual trip to watch the Pirates and Cubs play. The Wake Forest–Duke football game. What happens to players when they go to the broadcast booth.

A full fifteen minutes had passed when Arnold said, “I've been thinking about your question.” The table went quiet, and I realized almost immediately that Arnold was answering a question that was far different and more interesting than the one I had asked him.

“Tiger was somewhat of a robot golfer,” Arnold said. “He was so endeared to his father and what his father had him doing that it is almost difficult to explain. I watched him practice at Isleworth when he was in the midst of it. As long as he stuck to the routine that his father had laid out for him he was going to succeed. Had he continued to do that he probably could have established a record that would never have been broken.”

Earl Woods died in May 2006. From Earl's death through the time of our visit, Tiger had won four major titles: the 2006 British Open and PGA Championship, the 2007 PGA Championship, and the 2008 U.S. Open, in the playoff over Rocco Mediate.

“After his father died, and without getting into what happened and why it happened, Tiger got into other things,” Arnold said. “He went away from the routine and the work ethic that was so natural for him. It's happened before. It has something to do with the psychological effect of the game. If he doesn't try to go back to where he was five or six years ago, he will get worse instead of better. Could he go back to where he was? He could. Do I think he will? No.”

Just so you know, those were Arnold's own questions. It was like he was interviewing himself. It was like Arnold had thought so much about the subject of Tiger and his struggle to win more majors and was just waiting for the opportunity to talk about it. His sentences were so full and precise.

“I'll switch the tables,” Arnold said. “If I hadn't won that U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, I could have won at least four other U.S. Opens. I really believe that.”

You could almost see him making the list in his head.

“I could have won in '62.”

That was the year he lost to Jack Nicklaus in the playoff at Oakmont, in Arnold's backyard.

“Sixty-three.”

The playoff at the Country Club.

“Sixty-six.”

The one at Olympic.

“Sixty-seven.”

Tied with Nicklaus through three rounds at Baltusrol. Nicklaus won.

“Seventy-two.”

Arnold shot a Sunday 76 and finished four behind Nicklaus at Pebble.

“Seventy-three.”

Tied for the lead through three rounds at Oakmont. Johnny Miller shot 63 on Sunday and won.

“If I had had the same psychological approach I did at Cherry Hills, I could have won all those years,” Arnold said. “I lost my edge.”

That was some admission and some phrase, those last two words, and I didn't even know what they meant. What I knew was that Arnold was being raw and honest and saying things I had never heard him say.

“Winning that first U.S. Open was an obsession,” Arnold said. “The first thing you want to do is win an Open. Then, after you win it, you have to stay aggressive, stay the way you were when you won it. And it's difficult to do.”

You might be scratching your head here. After all, Arnold won dozens of tournaments after that 1960 U.S. Open, including two more victories at Augusta and his two British Opens. But what I think Arnold was saying was that after winning the '60 U.S. Open he lost something he was never able to recover. He was never the same, not deep down inside. Mike, in his own way, knew what Arnold was talking about. His golf was never the same after Medinah.

The table was silent for a long moment until Mike said, “It's such a fine edge.”

“It
is
,” Arnold said. “It's so fine. You have to get in there and you have to stay in there, and once you get out it's very hard to get back in. It's happened to every golfer. Hogan. Nicklaus. Every golfer. It's just a question of when.”

Did Arnold have that same obsessive need to practice and improve and win in '65 and '75 that he did in '55, when Winnie would stand with him as he beat balls? No, not with all that endorsement money rolling in and his plane idling on the tarmac and the whole world beckoning for him.
Every golfer
. Tom Watson. Jack Nicklaus. Mike Donald. Tiger Woods. Arnold Palmer.
It's just a question of when
.

Ken Venturi lived for years in a modern home in the California desert that was like a museum devoted to his life and times. Before that, he lived in a house with shag carpeting in Naples, Florida, that was the same way, decorated with the artifacts of his triumphs. I've had tours of both houses, as well as houses owned by other athletes, and in my experience that's the standard decorating scheme. Arnold's house was an exception, but he had his barn and his suite of offices. It's an understandable impulse. I'm sure Picasso had a lot of his paintings on his walls.