Golfer's Life

Clear September evenings are beautiful in the little town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, where I grew up and still live. A few days after my sixty-eighth birthday, on just such an evening, my wife Winnie and I left home and drove down the hill to the township road that hasn't changed much in the past half-century, crossed over, and started up the winding driveway of Latrobe Country Club. The driveway crosses a small brook and two fairways, the steep downhill first and the long uphill 18th. We paused to allow a couple of late finishers--two boys carrying their own bags--to hit their final approach shots on 18. Winnie reached over and took my hand and commented that I seemed awfully quiet--and was driving awfully slowly--for a man who had a big speech to make in a few minutes. Under normal circumstances I enjoy giving speeches, and I seldom use a prepared text, because years ago I discovered that speaking to people straight from the heart about a subject you love may be a bit more risky, but the rewards are almost always greater in the end. That's just my style, I guess--the way I prefer to play golf and the way I prefer to speak to people. This crowd was different, however. The occasion was my fiftieth high school reunion, and at that moment almost two hundred people from Latrobe High's Class of 1947 were gathered in the upstairs dining room or sipping cocktails on the adjacent lawn, waiting for their unofficial host to arrive and get the festivities under way. I hadn't seen many of these folks in over half a century--a thought that probably astounded them as much as it did me. How could that time have gone by so rapidly? Most of those in attendance, I knew, now lived other places and had come back to Latrobe from great distances. Others there were some of my closest friends on earth. But all of them had known me long before I became a famous public figure named Arnold Palmer. To them, I was simply "Arnie" Palmer, the skinny, golf-crazy son of Deke and Doris Palmer, the boy who would grow up and do well enough to buy the club where once upon a time he was permitted on the course only before the members arrived in the morning or after they had gone home in the evening. I peered through the windshield and watched as one of the boys made a strong swing, and I remember commenting to Winnie, as his ball flew away in the twilight toward an unseen flag up the hill, "He may like that better than he knows." I knew what that boy was feeling, because I'd hit that final shot--perhaps from that very spot--thousands of times myself over the past fifty or sixty years. And every time, it filled me with a mixture of hope and wonder. The boys picked up their bags and moved on. Wrapped in the spell of the game, they probably didn't have a clue or a care in the world who was watching them, and that's exactly as it should be, a tribute to this marvelous game we play. There is something magical about finishing a golf round in the dusk. Driving on, I admitted to Winnie that I was a bit worried about what I was going to say to the folks on the hill, and she knew why without my having to say anything more. It wasn't being sixty-eight that was chewing away at me or even the slight bittersweet feeling I often experience with September's arrival--brought on by the knowledge that another golf season is slowly winding down. The truth was, several things had happened to us in the preceding year that made this homecoming all the more poignant, and therefore somewhat difficult for me. She simply squeezed my hand and assured me that when it came time to speak, she knew I would do just fine. "Oh really?" I said, with mock annoyance. "And what makes you so sure about that?" She smiled that simple, no-nonsense smile of hers I've always loved and found so comforting, whether I set the course record or shot 80 in the fPalmer, Arnold is the author of 'Golfer's Life' with ISBN 9780345414823 and ISBN 0345414829.