Men in Green by Michael Bamberger Read Free Book Online Page B

see me go that far right again.’ ”
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    Not even a mile from Arnold’s office is a giant warehouse that Arnold calls the barn. (Simplicity is one of Arnold’s chief gifts.) Arnold’s brother, Jerry, thirteen years younger and the former superintendent of the Latrobe course, gave Mike and me a tour. Evidently, Arnold’s mother couldn’t throw out anything, and Arnold was the same way. There were scores of bag tags, thousands of clubs, hundreds of books, boxes and boxes of photos, canister after canister of network film from various tournaments, the antique tractor from a famous Pennzoil ad, dozens of artworks sent to him by fans, and more leather golf shoes than you’d want to count.
    â€œThis can’t be every pair of golf shoes he’s ever had, can it?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not sure,” Jerry said.
    â€œIt probably is!” Mike said.
    Mike loved Palmer. Being in that barn was like touring the Louvre for Mike. Jerry thought Mike was the first tour player to see it.
    â€œYou figure three, four pair a year, for fifty years, this could be all of them,” Mike said. He picked up a shoe. “You know what I like? You feel how heavy this shoe is? It just seems like everything they made then had more quality.”
    â€œThe amazing thing,” Jerry said, “is that we could bring Arnold in here and he could tell you what shoes he wore at what tournament.”
    â€œUnbelievable,” Mike said, responding not really to Jerry but to his awe at the whole scene. He picked up an old iron and said, “Look at these irons. Would you look at them?”
    The irons were old Wilson Staffs, the forebears of the club Mike used when he nearly won the U.S. Open. I looked at them. They looked tiny, obsolete—beautiful.
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    The warehouse tour was the final thing we did before leaving Latrobe, but for this report I have saved lunch for last. We ate in the Latrobe Country Club grillroom. Arnold introduced Mike to the clubhouse manager as “the guy Hale Irwin beat in the U.S. Open. They had a playoff.”
    Arnold is an expert on the subject of losing U.S. Open playoffs. He had been defeated by Nicklaus at Oakmont near Pittsburgh in the ’62 playoff, by Julius Boros at the Country Club in Brookline in ’63, and by Billy Casper at Olympic in San Francisco in ’66. In Arnold’s day, the Masters was charming and clubby and genteel, and Arnold won it four times. In more recent years, it has become the prized jewel of golf events. It gives its winners something money cannot buy: the ultimate golf time-share, complete with a parking space near the clubhouse and a green sport coat to wear inside it. But for Arnold, for Mike, for any American touring pro who grew up in a less cushy time, the national open will always be more important. They belonged to a country-first generation and they welcomed the tournament’s extreme challenge. It’s a modest link between Mike and Arnold that they both know what it’s like to lose a U.S. Open in a playoff. But it’s significant.
    We sat at a round table, Arnold, Kit, Doc, Mike, me, and Pete Luster, Arnold’s pilot. I ordered an Arnold Palmer. I’ve seen Arnold have a martini at lunch, or a beer or a glass or two of wine, but on this day he ordered a Coke Zero. Mike was paying attention. He was going to order whatever Arnold ordered.
    We talked about the Congressional Gold Medal that Arnold had just received and made a list of the five other athletes who had received it. Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Byron Nelson came readily. The fifth name was elusive for a minute until Doc remembered it: Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who died while doing relief work for earthquake victims.
    We talked about the results of the World Golf Hall of Fame voting and whether Fred Couples