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My Shot: Arnold Palmer
The King ruminates on bad dreams, untucked shirts and why the legs are always the first to go.
Interviewed by Guy Yocom
Golf Digest
June 2007
My whole career, I never missed a tee time. Not once, which I suppose is saying a lot for a career that's spanned 60 years and thousands of rounds of golf. Now, for many years I've had a recurring dream that I miss my tee time. In the dream there's no consequence because I wake up abruptly. You can't imagine the relief, realizing that it was just a dream. Now that I'm retired, I'm hoping to hell that dream will go away.
It interests me how Phil Mickelson is perceived as being too aggressive. It interests me because Tiger is every bit as aggressive as Phil. Look at some of the shots Tiger hits into the green from the wrong fairway, the long shots over water, the tremendous shots he hits from the trees. There's been one difference between the two guys, and it's that Tiger is in good enough shape physically to pull them off. I'm serious. If Phil were in better condition, he'd have a lot more success when he goes for broke. He probably has as much raw talent as Tiger, but his body might rob him of a little precision in those situations where he really needs it.
I get invited to weddings of the sons and daughters of friends of mine, and I always end up crying. Sometimes I haven't even met the young people. When I watch the movie "Northwest Passage" with Spencer Tracy, I cry. Not because it's that kind of movie, but because Tracy's character reminds me of my father. So yes, I'd say I'm a sentimental guy.
Pap told me, "When you get older, the first thing that's going to go is your legs." He was right. I've walked throughout my career; only a few times when there were extenuating circumstances did I ride a cart on the Champions Tour. I was very mindful of my legs, but they went anyway. You lose your snap down there, your ability to support your upper body. When my game began to deteriorate, I knew it was my legs.
Toward the end, I was playing tournaments on the Champions Tour because the tournaments and their sponsors asked me to play. The last couple of years, it wasn't easy to do that. I'm a proud man, and to play like I did was embarrassing, and downright painful. Just terrible for me. Playing in the Father-Son with my grandson Sam, I could sort of hide because Sam's a good player. I enjoyed that. But the official events, it got to a point where whatever good I was doing for the tournament didn't compensate for the emotional pain it put me through.
If you have a child just starting out in the game, one of the best things you can do is get him a push mower--a lawn mower with no engine. When I was a kid, one of my responsibilities was to mow the lawn with the type of push mower everybody used in those days. Between that and driving a tractor that didn't have power steering, I got strength in my hands and forearms that never really went away, and which helped me enormously in golf. Push mowers are hard to find, but getting one will do your junior golfer more good than just about any swing trainer.
I sure wish the decorum around our game was better. If we just dressed a little neater, I'd be happy. There's a trend in some circles to not care at all--wear your hat backward, don't tuck your shirt in, don't iron anything. That isn't style, it's just not caring.
My shirt tail hung out a lot. But heck, I had a thin waist and the kind of swing that tended to untuck my shirt for me. But I started out with it tucked in--that's the difference.
I've got hundreds of persimmon drivers. Years ago I could always go and choose one if the one I was using wasn't working. Then metal woods came along, and overnight I went from owning hundreds of backup drivers to owning a museum. It's sad that these great works of art have no practical use anymore.
I was scared to lose. Just terrified of it. The first part of my career especially, the fear of doing my best and it not being good enough, of failing, was a huge motivating force for me. Jackie Burke says many great champions are basically insecure people who are secretly afraid of returning to the background they came out of, and that might have been true with me. We all love winning, but losing carried some connotations that just made it unacceptable to me. I was a gracious loser, but I sure did hate getting beat.
You can't be scared standing on the first tee. You've got to learn to deal with that. I had a system. I made my mind go back to the most basic fundamentals of the game: my grip, my stance, the position of my head, the first things I learned. It became a habit. If you watch old videos of me getting ready to play, you'll see me gripping and regripping the club, waggling, taking my stance and then standing normally. I'm reviewing the fundamentals. It made me think of what I should be doing, as opposed to how important it was. I highly recommend it.
There were times when I stood on the 18th tee feeling my life would all but end if I didn't win, and when I didn't win, I discovered my life in fact did not end. When I lost to Billy Casper at Olympic [in the 1966 U.S. Open], I found afterward that in many ways my life improved. In the aftermath of that loss and a few others, more of life came calling, and I continued on with a slightly different perspective. I was better for the experience. In a roundabout way, I'm telling you why Tiger breaking Jack's record is not a gimme. I realize Tiger has only seven majors to go, but the truth is, we don't know what his desires might be a year or two, or five, from now. Never assume you know those things.
Ever stand over a putt and just know you were going to make it? That great feeling where the putt's as good as in, that all you have to do is stroke it? Hundreds of golfers have described the sensation to me, and I still don't know what they're talking about. In my day I was a good putter, and there were times when my confidence ran high, but I never felt that premonition. I was so desperate to make every putt that I focused very hard and didn't take any chances. When I birdied 17 and 18 to win the Masters in 1960--I made a long putt on 17--I guess I was in a frame of mind to make the putts. But I never felt I was in a zone where it seemed like the golf gods were giving me putts. I felt like I earned every one of them.
I'll always argue that the worst thing you can do is leave a putt short. I'll never understand any of the arguments to the contrary, because they're basically saying that you should stand over the putt hoping not to three-putt. Get the ball to the hole no matter what. If you get the ball to the hole, you at least give it a chance to go in. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is the object of the game.
Bad weather was a huge problem for my generation. The raingear was terrible; none of it was really waterproof. There were no non-slip gloves, and the grips all got slippery. The golf courses had very poor drainage systems. Courses would mow the fairways as close as they dared because the tour was in town, and there often wasn't that much grass to begin with. So when it rained, the fairways turned into mud. The mud would cake on our leather shoes something terrible; you'd scrape it off, take two steps, and it would be right back on there. You gave up. In the 1950s, many a time I was 5-11 when I teed off and 6-1 when I walked off. When our leather shoes got wet, they weighed a couple of pounds apiece. You ever watch those NFL games played in the 1950s, the crappy helmets and pads and big, heavy cleats they wore? What we had was the golf equivalent of that.
It's pretty well known that Ben Hogan didn't bond with anyone, but I have to say, he was particularly chilly to me. He very pointedly referred to me as "Fellah," even face to face. I just accepted it, and in the end he wasn't my type of guy anyway. I wasn't a special case; he didn't bond with Nelson or Snead, either. He was cordial to them but never was close to either man. He never grew close to any golfer, with the possible exceptions of Jackie Burke and Jimmy Demaret. For all of the talk of my rivalry with Jack Nicklaus, at heart we truly like each other. I can't say the same for Ben Hogan and me.
If you hit a darned good drive but it takes a bad kick and goes out-of-bounds by a foot, it's two strokes. Period. If you fan it--miss the ball completely--it's one stroke. I've never understood that.
Of all the tournaments that got away--and I let a lot get away--the one that hurt the most was the 1961 Masters. I made the most terrible mistake a golfer can make, which is taking it for granted I was going to win. I double-bogeyed the last hole to lose by one to Gary Player, and it hurt so much--and still does--that I never let it happen again. Losing to Casper at Olympic, coming up short in the Open playoff against Jack at Oakmont in '62, none of them was nearly as painful as Augusta in '61.
One of the great mysteries in golf is how you can be playing great and then suddenly lose your game in the middle of a round. It happened to me at Olympic. When the train leaves the tracks, it's very rare you can get it back on track. What happens is, you get a little anxious. That causes you to start swinging quickly, and worse, thinking quickly. You start pressing, for distance mainly but sometimes trying to pull off shots you have no business trying. It's very hard--impossible, really--to reverse your thinking and go back to the frame of mind you were in just a couple of holes before. It happens to even the finest players, and when it happens they could have the best sport psychologist in the world caddieing for them and he couldn't help.
Of all the people I've met, one man stands a little above the rest: Dwight Eisenhower had a presence about him that was just profound. On the occasions I was with him, he exuded a type of character I hadn't experienced before and haven't quite experienced since. He was humble and sincere, yet also honest and direct. Ike is the only person I've met who made me feel a little star-struck.
I was scheduled to play golf with President John Kennedy, but it was canceled. Jimmy Carter didn't play golf, and I'm not sure Lyndon Johnson did, either. I played horseshoes with George W. Bush up in Kennebunkport, but not golf. So I played golf with only six presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the first President Bush and Bill Clinton. That's pretty good. You know somebody who's played with more?
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