Free A Golfer's Life by Arnold Palmer Page A

me over to a big invitational tournament in Indiana, where we really cleaned up in the Calcutta portion of the tournament and I almost won the regular tournament. I did win several smaller pro-am and regional invitational tournaments that summer, and I had more pocket change than I’d dreamed of.
    By summer’s end, though, I couldn’t wait to get back to Wake and see Bud and resume my college life. Wake Forest was a Baptist-affiliated institution, which, in those days, allowed no drinking or dancing on campus. Students were required to take their partying and social life elsewhere, usually to taverns and hotels in Durham or Raleigh, a drive of about twenty miles over twisting backcountry roads. I understood the scriptural basis for such a policy, but, quite frankly, even now I question the wisdom of segregating a young person’s academic life from his social one. The fact is, there were a lot of unsupervised parties off campus in those days. Like Pap used to, I now think the school’s rigidity on this issue probably contributed to underage drinking problems and made consuming alcohol seem much more glamorous than need be, by extension increasing the possibility of irresponsible driving.
    Socially and academically, Bud and I had a system of sorts worked out where we more or less looked after each other. Our strengths and weaknesses beautifully complemented each other’s. I had a stronger physical constitution that allowed me to handle alcohol, sometimes showing little or no effects, so I was always the one who drove Bud’s Buick when we went out on dates or in a group to party in Durham or Raleigh. As I’ve said, Bud was shyer than me, so it was left to me to speak to girls and arrange our “dates,” if you want to call them that.
    On the academic front, Bud had a strong work ethic and was forever on my case about keeping up my grade point average to avoid losing my scholarship and being put on academic probation, or worse, getting kicked out of school and probably drafted. Quite honestly, I really wasn’t much of a student. For a while I thought fleetingly about a career in law but then switched to a business major, figuring that I could at least graduate to a nice businessman’s job somewhere that would allow me the freedom to make a decent living
and
play the kind of top amateur golf I envisioned myself playing.
    The idea of turning touring professional was also always somewhere in the back of my mind, I must confess, but not if it involved having to do the kind of demeaning jobs I’d always seen Pap do in order to support my family. Several years after my college days, I commented to a reporter that above all else I was determined to avoid the second-class life of my father’s profession. I meant no disrespect to Pap and the life of a club professional. Back then a club professional’s status was so different from that of today’s professional, and I knew in my gut there was no way I could put up with the things I’d seen Pap put up with over the years.
    Golf would be my ticket
somewhere
, I told myself, I just couldn’t say where it would lead me. But life at Wake for thetime being, even with the social restrictions, couldn’t have been better. After constructing the new grass greens on the school golf course, I was free to play as much as I wanted and sometimes even invited my dates to be human targets on the greens. God only knows why they agreed to do it; perhaps I had more charm than I realized in those days, except with a certain academic dean who took to summoning me to his office for friendly chats about my casual academic performance.
    During my sophomore year, I captured a second straight Southern Conference championship and became the medalist (or low qualifier) at the National Intercollegiate finals at Ames, Iowa, where I lost to Tom Veech of Notre Dame in the semifinals. Harvie Ward beat Veech in the final match to take the NCAA championship. I remember being furious with myself because I’d