An intertwined history of Arnie and Oakmont

LATROBE, Pa. -- Arnold Palmer stood outside Latrobe Country Club, not far from its swimming pool, his left arm interlocked with the right arm belonging to the club official about to walk him toward a cart. A woman motioned for Palmer to come see her hit golf balls, and after the official helped the 86-year-old legend into his seat, off the two men went to watch.

This was two weeks before the start of the U.S. Open at Oakmont, and in the early afternoon sun Palmer looked a bit sturdier than he did on the first tee that Thursday morning in April at Augusta National, where he arrived physically unable to strike a ceremonial drive with Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. For many of those who watched this scene unfold at the Masters -- Palmer being ushered to the tee box and into a white chair -- his appearance was alarming. He looked pained, frail, down a good 20 or 25 pounds. His green jacket seemed at least one size too large.

Of course, we all thought Arnold Daniel Palmer would be young and strong forever, and more capable of filling out his shirts and jackets than anyone in his sport. He always came across as a halfback who had just emerged season-ready from an NFL training camp.

Longtime pro Chi Chi Rodriguez thought Palmer in his prime looked like Gene Fullmer, former middleweight champion of the world. "And Arnold had hands like Rocky Marciano," Rodriguez said. "When he closed his fist, it must've weighed 10 pounds."

Palmer was a greenskeeper's son cut right out of the western Pennsylvania hillside, and he didn't play golf as much as he attacked it with his heavyweight hands and blacksmith arms. His old man, Deacon, became the club pro and didn't let any Latrobe members tell him how to raise his boy or even change his boy's violent swing, including the one who swore Arnold would amount to nothing more than a ditch digger. Many years later, Arnold answered the man's prediction the only way he knew how -- by taking some of the money he'd earned as a seven-time major champion and buying Latrobe Country Club.

This working man's hero never left his hometown. Though Palmer winters in Orlando, Florida, at his other club, Bay Hill, he spends six months every year not in the south of France, or in some exotic estate, but in a modest home (for a man of his wealth and stature) overlooking his small office building near the Latrobe course. On the same course, he was raised in a house with no indoor plumbing. This goes a long way in a city of 8,000 residents with the kind of outdated storefront signs that project a charming 1970s vibe.

So does the fact that Palmer's club isn't accessible only to the one percenters, but to the two, three, four and five percenters, too. It's a private course for the public course guy who grinded his way up the socioeconomic ladder, a guy like Marty Newingham, a 58-year-old former caddie and current member who counts himself among Palmer's close friends. A couple of weeks ago, Newingham bore witness to a fairly remarkable event.

Arnold Palmer hit golf balls for the first time since last August, when he managed to play five holes with his friends. He hit 25 to 30 of them on the practice range, and nobody who found out cared that few, if any, of his shots traveled beyond 100 yards.

"It was terrible," Palmer told his chief assistant of half a century, Doc Giffin. "I couldn't hit it anywhere."

The point was that Arnold Palmer was still trying, still fighting against the undefeated forces of nature and time. He made two more trips to the Latrobe range in recent days, including one Saturday, hitting a couple dozen balls each time and surprising his friends by maintaining a steady stance in the process.

Palmer's physical decline started in December 2014, when he said he "tripped on a carpet and did a 360" dislocating his right shoulder so severely that, according to one associate, three doctors were required to screw it back into place. The shoulder injury conspired with hip problems, spinal stenosis, oral surgery, a toe infection and surgery, a pacemaker implant, and deep vein thrombosis to keep Palmer from playing any full rounds of golf since he took part in the Seminole Golf Club Pro-Member in March 2014.

But more than anything, a series of falls has compromised Palmer's health and worried those closest to him. One associate estimated that Palmer has fallen "more than a dozen times," and that his left leg often goes out from underneath him without warning. People close to him have strongly encouraged him to use a walker or a cane, but this is Arnold Palmer we're talking about. He barely agreed to use the elevator to his third-floor condo at Bay Hill.

Palmer has taken on a full-time aide in Latrobe (that wasn't an easy sell, either), but he is still very much the de facto mayor of his club, his city and his region. They make 'em tough in western Pennsylvania, whether you're talking steelworkers or coal miners or quarterbacks. Or golfers. The King is the game's reigning king of pain.

So it's no surprise Palmer hasn't completely surrendered to the notion that he won't make it to Oakmont this week. His longtime IMG agent, Alastair Johnston, told the USGA weeks ago that Palmer couldn't appear as part of his role as honorary co-chairman with Nicklaus, who beat him in an epic playoff at Oakmont in 1962. Giffin has also described a possible visit as a long shot at best.

But Palmer has talked about it, just as he has talked about teeing it up with his Latrobe regulars in the not-too-distant future. His spirit is much stronger than his body right now, and as the golfing world descends on Oakmont, a 40-mile drive from Palmer's home, the entire field should remember just how much that spirit has meant to the game.

Palmer isn't the greatest player ever; he is, however, the most important player ever, and the most beloved. Like his late, great contemporary, Muhammad Ali, Palmer was celebrated for his emotional generosity, for his eagerness to make eye contact with strangers and to ensure they felt invested in a shared experience. He granted more autograph requests, posed for more pictures, and personally answered more fan mail than any golfer before or after him. By the design of his first-grade teacher (Rita Taylor), and by the order of a father he feared, Palmer's signature set the legibility standard for all American icons.

This is why Rodriguez said that golf without Arnold Palmer "would be like 'Gunsmoke' without Matt Dillon. There's no 'Gunsmoke' without Matt Dillon."

And there can be no U.S. Open at Oakmont without the story of the golfer who wanted to win on that course as much as he ever wanted to win at Augusta National. Palmer played Oakmont for the first time at age 12 (and shot 82). He played his first Open at Oakmont (1953), his most memorable Open at Oakmont (1962), his most improbable Open at Oakmont (1973), and his last Open at Oakmont (1994), on the same day his commercial partner, O.J. Simpson, led police on a slow-speed chase into infamy.

Palmer won the 1949 West Penn Amateur on his backyard course, one of the toughest in the land, but never an Open -- a fact that diminishes absolutely nothing about him. He's as much a part of Oakmont as the stretch of Pennsylvania Turnpike snaking through it. And even if golf's grand old man can't make it over from Latrobe this week to give the fans one last thumbs-up, players need to understand that these are very much Palmer's people, and this is very much his house. If a little history lesson is needed, well, it's time to take a few notes.

OAKMONT, 1962 -- Arnold Palmer could not lose this tournament. He was a three-time Masters champion who had won the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale the year before, and who had erased a 7-stroke deficit in the final round to win the U.S. Open the year before that. Family members, friends, opponents, oddsmakers -- they were all certain Palmer would enhance his standing as golf's first TV star on a course he'd already played more than a hundred times.

What a story it would've been, too. The local boy born into the Great Depression had started playing for money as a 5-year-old in Latrobe, agreeing to hit a lady's ball over a drainage ditch for a nickel. He became the No. 1 varsity player as a freshman at Latrobe High School, and when he played with his friends on Monday mornings -- and when those friends playfully identified themselves as Ben Hogan and Sam Snead and Byron Nelson -- the most confident member of the foursome would always respond, "I'm Arnold Palmer."

He said it very slowly, recalled one of those friends, Ed Matko. "When Arnold was 14, 15 years old," Matko said, "he already knew he was destined for greatness."

Driven to prove something to his taskmaster father, Palmer dominated the amateur ranks of western Pennsylvania, left Wake Forest and joined the Coast Guard after his teammate and confidant, Buddy Worsham, died in a car crash.

As a paint salesman, Palmer won the 1954 U.S. Amateur in a class conflict with Robert Sweeny, an Oxford-educated investment banker. A star was born, and so was a cause. Palmer would be the one to bring golf to those who labored for the country club elite.

That's why the mill workers came out in droves for Palmer at the 1962 U.S. Open, and turned your typical climate-controlled golf gallery into an overheated Steelers crowd. Palmer made the daily drive to and from Latrobe. He was paired with the tour rookie, Jack Nicklaus, in the first two rounds, and was fighting through a finger injury he suffered while handling his luggage at the Latrobe airport that would be named for him 37 years later.

Nicklaus? He was fighting through the kind of road heckling that normally greeted football, baseball and basketball players -- not golfers. Fans called him "Fat Jack" and "Fat Guts" and made distracting noises when he lined up a putt.

"Arnold was the first player to bring people like that off the street," said Phil Rodgers, who finished tied for third that year. "He was like an everyday ironworker, big and strong and puffing on his cigarette, his shirt tail hanging out, and he took a rip at it and attacked every hole. Hogan's game was very plotted out, almost a script. Arnold? He didn't have a script. His script was whatever I am going to do now, and people loved it."

Those people didn't want him to lose to an opponent who came from the right side of the tracks. Nicklaus was hardly a blue blood -- his father, Charlie, ran a few drugstores -- but Palmer's family and fans saw Nicklaus as a country clubber all the same. The Oakmont crowd turned so ugly on Fat Jack that Charlie Nicklaus went after one of the hecklers before a family friend, tempestuous Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes -- who would lose his career to a punch he threw at an opposing player -- actually stepped in and calmed him down.

Arnold's sister, Cheech, would later concede that the crowd's treatment of Nicklaus was embarrassing. Arnold's daughter, Peg, remembered "how horrible it felt to have people attack one of my dad's opponents. I recall it not being what I learned golf was supposed to be about. My grandfather was very upset and ashamed."

But on the other hand, Cheech would say, "All of us hated Jack Nicklaus. We thought he was another one of those spoiled little rich kids, and he was." They hated him more when this Open was closed. Palmer had a 10-footer to win on the 72nd hole, and as he settled into his famous knock-kneed stance, the man he was paired with, Bob Rosburg, told him, "If you were ever going to make a putt, make this one, will you?"

Palmer missed. Young Nicklaus was never unnerved by the crowd; in fact, Palmer thought it sharpened his opponent's edge. Jack overpowered Arnold and outputted him in the 18-hole playoff. (Palmer had 11 three-putts over 90 holes on the lightning-fast greens; Nicklaus had one.)

When Nicklaus had prevailed, the runner-up admitted he'd never wanted a victory as badly as he wanted this one. Palmer retreated to the basement of his home, tapped a keg of Latrobe's hometown beer, Rolling Rock, for his gathered friends, and spoke of this lost opportunity from behind the bar. His agent, Mark McCormack, who had started International Management Group on a handshake with Palmer, was there with his wife, Nancy, who described the scene as "a wake."

The good news was that the players' wives, Winnie Palmer and Barbara Nicklaus, somehow walked the entire playoff together and forged a lasting friendship that softened a decades-long rivalry that caused fractures in their husbands' relationship. The bad news was that Nicklaus, at 22, suddenly had reason to believe he could beat the 32-year-old King on any stage.

But in assessing the devastating defeat, one angle never talked about or written about enough was Palmer's resilience. He came back four weeks later to dominate the Open Championship at Troon, winning the oldest major for a second straight time and finishing 29 strokes ahead of Nicklaus, who tied for 34th.

Palmer once couldn't afford to make the trip to play in the British Amateur, and now he was undisputed royalty overseas. He had re-established the Open as a required destination for top American players, and back home he had re-established himself as the muscular force who ascended to a Mays and Mantle level of stardom and transformed the way sports fans looked at golf.

Palmer was the people's champ in every way. Soon enough, Rodriguez said, players were suggesting that the tour was putting Sunday pin placements on the left side of greens to favor Palmer.

"Arnold always made his ball go right to left," Rodriguez said. "But I used to tell those players, 'Arnold is the one who keeps the purses going. While every other guy is taking money out of our pockets, he's putting money in our pockets. So who would you rather win other than Arnold Palmer?'"

OAKMONT, 1973 -- Bobby Nichols, who finished in a tie for third at Oakmont in '62, loves to tell a story about Arnold Palmer. (Who doesn't?) They were playing a memorial golf tournament in 1967 in honor of fellow pro Tony Lema, who died in a plane crash the previous summer, and the low score would win a new Mercury XR7 put up by the Ford Motor Company.

Palmer won the car with a course-record 63 at the old Stardust Country Club in Las Vegas, beating Nichols by 7 shots. "The wind was howling that day, up to 30 miles per hour," Nichols recalled. "It's one of the most incredible rounds of golf Arnold ever played."

But Nichols' father had worked for Ford for 41 years, and Bobby remembered two things that day: (1) His father had told him that no Ford employee could enter company-sponsored contests; and (2) Palmer was a member of Ford's Lincoln-Mercury sports panel. Nichols congratulated Palmer on his victory, and then jokingly whispered in a public relations man's ear that the winner wasn't technically eligible for the prize. Sure enough, as Nichols was changing his shoes in the locker room, the PR man returned to tell him the car was his.

"And two or three weeks later," Nichols said, "Arnold comes up to me and says, 'Damn you, you cost me $125,000.'"

A puzzled Nichols asked Palmer what he was talking about; that car wasn't worth anything close to $125,000.

"No," Palmer responded, "but after you took it from me, Ford decided to give me the biggest tractor they make. So then I had to go buy a farm."

Only Arnold Palmer. Someone stole his car, and he got even by buying a farm.

America still adored him in the spring of 1973, the spring of Secretariat. Palmer had become a marketing machine, paving the way for future Michael Jordans and Peyton Mannings as a guy who could sell anything to anyone. Beyond that, Palmer had just ended a personal drought in February by beating Nicklaus in a breathless, 90-hole duel at the Bob Hope Desert Classic in what would be his 62nd and final tour victory. He celebrated that night by dancing cheek-to-cheek with Nicklaus as Jack wore a woman's wig.

Four months later, the Oakmont crowd was far more civil to Nicklaus than it was in 1962; Jack had slimmed down, for one, and had worn down Palmer's fans with his greatness. But the crowd was no less enthusiastic in its support for the 43-year-old local, who had a chance to punctuate his career with a triumph that would've been the equal of Nicklaus' 13 years later at the Masters. Palmer played with Johnny Miller in the first two rounds, and in citing the size and passion of Arnie's Army, Miller said the pairing to him "was like a 4-shot penalty."

Palmer hadn't won a major in nine years, and he was seven years removed from his excruciating U.S. Open loss to Billy Casper at the Olympic Club, where he blew a 7-shot lead with nine holes to go. Back at Oakmont, Palmer entered the final round in a tie for the lead with John Schlee, Jerry Heard and 53-year-old Julius Boros; Miller was 6 shots back and considered out of the tournament.

But with a wet Oakmont vulnerable, Miller, coming off a 76, teed off well ahead of the leaders and started tearing the place apart while only a precious few watched. It seemed the entire crowd of 23,000 was following Palmer, who picked up an early birdie at the fourth and arrived at the 11th green believing he had the lead.

But after missing a short putt, Palmer saw the scoreboard that had Miller at 8 under for the day, 5 under for the tournament. He turned to Schlee and said, "Where the f--- did he come from?"

Palmer's tee shot at No. 12 took a bad bounce into the deep rough, and his game unraveled from there. Miller won with his record score of 63, inspired in part by the advice of his father, who told him that he needed some Arnold Palmer in his game -- a willingness to go for broke when everyone else was playing for the center of the green.

OAKMONT, 1983 -- Marty Newingham started caddying for Arnold Palmer in the mid-1970s, and the boss prepared for the U.S. Open like he prepared for no other event. A month before the tournament started, Palmer would ask Newingham to show up at his Latrobe office at 7:30 a.m. to load his clubs into the car and head out to the 14th hole. Arnold would park his Cadillac behind the tee box, and sometimes Winnie would lay out a blanket and watch as her husband hit 150-250 balls.

Palmer had Newingham place his shag bag precisely 267 yards out in the fairway, and he'd consistently land his drives 3 feet to the left, 3 feet to the right, or directly on top of the bag. Newingham watched Palmer hit some magnificent shots with Hogan woods and irons, including one 7-iron into the 11th hole that stopped 2 feet right of the cup, inspiring the caddie to comment on how effectively his man was hitting these clubs.

"And he handed me back that 7-iron and said, 'Marty, we're done with these. We're not going to use them anymore,'" Newingham recalled. Palmer had his own clubs in the market, and he never had any use for Hogan, the man, who refused to call Palmer by his name and who ridiculed him in the Augusta National locker room after Palmer made a mess of a practice round in 1958, when Arnie won his first of four green jackets.

Palmer worked on his long game for two, two and a half hours, and Newingham wished he'd spent more time on the short game (a usual session lasted 15 minutes). But the caddie was living every ounce of the dream. When he was a boy, his grandfather would take him to the Latrobe airport to watch Palmer fly back into town after a victory. "Someone from the control tower would know Arnold was coming in," Newingham said, "and the phone chain unfolded. There was nothing but a chain link fence between the tarmac and hangar, and it drew a crowd when he flew in. It was an event."

Man, did Arnold love flying his airplanes. As an amateur golfer and passenger on a DC-3 heading to a tournament in Chattanooga, Palmer was terrified by a ball of fire raging up and down the aisle of the plane. He didn't swear that day to never fly again; he swore to learn everything he could about static electricity and the weather phenomenon known as St. Elmo's fire -- and to take more control of his destiny at 40,000 feet.