A Golfer's Life Read Online Free Page B

way in the form of a bold draw and the occasional monstrous hook—and offer me tips and insights about how I could improve and refine it. Others marveled that it worked as well as it did.
    A case in point is an incident that took place on the practice tee at Chick Harbert’s club in Detroit during my rookie year on the Tour in 1955. I was hitting balls with my driver when I realized George Fazio and Tony Penna were standing there watching me. I knew Fazio a bit—he once gave me a lift when I was hitchhiking back to Wake Forest, a funny story I’ll get to in a while—but Penna was a ball-striking legend. I really wanted to show off, so I teed up some balls and let out the shaft, pounding drives to the rear of the range.
    I heard Penna ask Fazio if he knew who I was.
    “Sure. That’s this kid Arnold Palmer. He just won the National Amateur.”
    “Well, better tell him to get a job,” Penna said with unmistakable disdain, almost mockery. “With that swing of his, he’ll
never
make it out here.”
    I really burned inside at that remark. Many years later, after I’d won the Bob Hope Classic for the third time, I saw Tony again. He came up to me and winked and said, in that same slightly mocking voice, “Palmer, you’re beginning to swing that club pretty good.”
    I guess I was. The point is, early on my views about the golf swing—and, for that matter, life in general—were shaped by a man who believed in the virtues of hard work and following the rules but essentially doing things your own way in this world.
    Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing—and it’s a tribute to him that anytime I ever got in trouble with my swing, lost the feel or touch in a shot, it was usually because I became enamored of some popular teacher’s ideas about the “mechanics” of the golf swing and gave their advice a try, often really screwing myself up for a time.
    Mine was, and remains, almost the antithesis of a “mechanical” golf swing. Everybody has their theories about what makes a good golf swing, but Pap’s basic premise was that once you learned the proper grip and understood the fundamental motion behind the swing, the trick was to find the swing that worked best for you and your body type, maximized your power. The rest of it was a lifelong learning process of refinement by trial and error, seeing what worked by how the club felt in your hands. Even at the pinnacle of my success in the middle 1960s, I would be practicing atLatrobe for hours, beating balls like you wouldn’t believe, and look up to discover him watching me. Typically, he might make some small comment about my swing, but overall he didn’t have much to say on the subject. It was inconceivable to think of a Sam Snead or Byron Nelson consulting a swing doctor or even asking another Tour professional for advice on their golf swings. As Ben Hogan later said, the answer was in the dirt, and pounding balls was the only way to find it. That was pretty much my father’s attitude, too. And it inevitably became mine.
    If that sounds simple, my father prided himself on simple, clear logic—a way of looking at life that I eventually accepted as “Deacon’s gospel.” Not surprisingly, he had the same simple reverence for the rules of the game. The rules were there to be followed, because that meant the game would be the same kind of challenge for everybody. Beating an opponent was meaningless unless it was done by the rule book. Unless winter rules were in effect or an area had been designated as under repair, for example, improving a lie would have been utterly unthinkable to him. Wherever you hit the ball and found it,
that
was the spot you played your next shot from. No casual rolling the ball in the rough or fairway. He was as rigid and unyielding on the rules of the game as any USGA official I ever knew, and that’s one reason I learned