A Golfer's Life Read Online Free Page A

angered the other workers, and one night some fella tried to spill molten metal on him. I don’t know what came of that incident, but if I’d been that man I sure wouldn’t have wanted to have met Pap in the alleyway after work that night.
    Because of his handicap, Pap learned he had to be tougher than the next fellow, regardless of his social position. As a result, I think, he developed even more rigid beliefs about what was right and what was wrong, what a good man did or didn’t do. You didn’t borrow money. You didn’t take what wasn’t yours; you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal. If you did any of those things, you weren’t anybody in Deacon Palmer’s eyes.
    Once, as a boy of about five, I lifted a packet of glue from the drugstore in Youngstown, just slipped it into my pocketand sidled nonchalantly out the door. I was nuts about building model airplanes in those days. Anyway, I’d barely reached the pavement out front when I began to worry that someone had seen me or would somehow find out and tell my pap what I’d done. The truly amazing thing is, I worried about that theft for the next sixty-five years, and the truth is I
still
worry a little bit that my father, wherever he is, will somehow find out I took that glue and lower the boom on me.
    Pap wasn’t big on spanking either Cheech or me. He left that task to our mother, Doris Palmer—and she did it only once, as far as I can remember, when Cheech and I burst out laughing at her after she tried to discipline us for some rules infraction. But the sound of his voice—combined with the size of his hands and their potential menace—was almost enough to freeze me in my tracks and set my bony knees quaking when I was caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.
    I began this reflection by saying I had two earliest memories involving Pap and hands. Here is the other one: When I was three, perhaps just before or some time after the broken milk bottle incident, my father put my hands in his and placed them around the shaft of a cut-down women’s golf club. He showed me the classic overlap, or Vardon, grip—the proper grip for a good golf swing, he said—and told me to hit the golf ball. Because the Vardon grip involves overlapping the small finger of one hand on the index finger of the other, it’s not the easiest grip for a small-fry to master. But an easier, baseball, grip would never have done, so I worked hard to learn the grip Pap showed me. It probably helped that my hands were larger than the average kid’s.
    His initial thoughts on the golf swing weren’t complicated, though. “Hit it
hard
, boy,” he said simply. “Go find it and hit it hard again.”
    Pap took basic lessons from the Latrobe Country Club’s first professional, a Scotsman named Davy Brand, and spent years refining his own swing enough to become a solid single-digit handicapper. Even though by this time he was regularly giving lessons to members, that was pretty much all the swing instruction he gave me for many years.
Get the right grip. Hit the ball hard. Go find the ball, boy, and hit it hard again …
    From the beginning I took his advice to heart and swung at the ball so hard I often toppled over. I remember how a prominent member once saw me take a cut at the ball and commented to him, “Deacon, you better do something about that kid’s swing. He swings so hard, he can’t even stay on his feet.” Without missing a beat, my pap leveled his gaze at this member and told him in no uncertain terms, “Dammit, J.R., you let me worry about the kid and you take care of your own game, all right?” Years later, after I began to have some success in junior golf and even when I was first playing on the PGA Tour, well-meaning people would watch me slug a golf ball with my unique and essentially homemade golf swing—a corkscrewing motion that relied almost entirely on my great upper-body strength, producing low-boring shots that seldom rose above eye level and flew a long