Free A Golfer's Life by Arnold Palmer Page B

never lost a match to Harvie Ward, and it would have been great to have the two of us, both representing the Southern Conference, vying for the national collegiate championship. It wasn’t to be, though.
    What was to be, however, in the summer break between my sophomore and junior years, was another West Penn Amateur title—I beat Jack Benson over a difficult Oakmont Country Club course, my first real glimpse of the famous course set up to tournament specs—and once again I was a semifinalist at the North and South Amateur. In midsummer, I managed to make it to the third round of the U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester before being eliminated with surgical precision, 4 and 3, by Crawford Rainwater of Pensacola, Florida. Two steps closer to the big prize, but ultimately another disappointment and a new resolution.
    My junior year at Wake was, in retrospect, maybe the most fun of all my college years. There were plenty of parties and plenty of pretty girls and lots of laughs and more competitive golf than I suppose I’d ever played in my life. Bud and I grewsocially more confident but were still basically inseparable, always ready to drop everything at the chance to beat each other on the golf course. This had been our standard operating procedure since our very first week at Wake Forest, when we managed to cajole a couple of coaches into taking us over to the Carolina Country Club in Raleigh for a four-ball match. Bud shot 67 that day, and I beat him by a stroke—on a course neither one of us had seen before. That set the tone for our matches, which always had something riding on them—at least the drinks afterward. My grades still weren’t great, but, once again, thanks to Bud Worsham, I was holding my own, and with Johnny Johnston’s return as the golf coach, I found a true friend and confidant for life.
    On weekends, I sometimes went to Bud’s home in Maryland, or he went to Latrobe with me. My younger brother, Jerry, and little sister Sandy (my parents had another set of children almost twenty years after Cheech and me) fell in love with Bud, and we both grew close to each other’s families. It was while we were hitchhiking back to school one weekend with our golf bags in tow that we met George Fazio. We had our thumbs out on U.S. 1 south of Washington when a big Cadillac pulled over. I recognized Fazio instantly, but he didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat until Bud told him who his older brother was. We told him we were headed back to college at Wake Forest, and he told us to hop in, asking if either of us was old enough to drive a car. I said yes. He promptly told me to drive, climbed in the back, issued firm orders to shake him awake when we got to North Carolina, then fell into a deep, noisy sleep. That was the first Cadillac I ever drove. I remember being impressed by that car, its big purring engine and nice interior, a true symbol of American success.
    We failed to win the Southern Conference team title, but my game had never been sharper and I captured the SouthernIntercollegiate championship and once again was low qualifier at the NCAA finals, firing a record pair of 68s at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a tournament that featured Billy Maxwell, Don January, and Jack and Jimmy Vickers, gunning for All-American fame. Unfortunately, as often happens after a record-setting performance, I let down my guard and played poorly in the semifinal round, and was beaten by a dark horse named Eli Bariteau of San Jose State. Being sent home early really hurt, but it only made me buckle down and practice that much harder. Later that summer the intense work paid dividends; I won my third West Penn Amateur and the Greensburg Invitational, tune-ups for what I hoped would be my big breakthrough at the U.S. Amateur at Minneapolis Country Club in Minnesota.
    Frank Stranahan of Toledo, Ohio, was my opponent in that first round. To be honest, this sort of pleased and worried me. Stranny, as I called him, was a