ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. -- Back off Obama, fellas.
The pundits who have been counting the rounds, if not every shot, of the sitting president might take note of the resume of the man who was among the 2009 class of inductees Monday at the World Golf Hall of Fame.
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| Arnie on Ike: 'The opportunity to play golf was probably as happy a part of his life as he had ever spent.' (Getty Images) |
The game, and those grounds, might not have technically been home. But it was definitely where his heart was.
Leading the Allied Forces and the American government might have been his vocation, but his dedication to his avocation was the stuff of sheer fanaticism, which is why when it came time to unveil the latest crop of inductees, it was easy to like Ike.
Arnold Palmer, a friend, confidant and golf partner dozens of times over the years, personally handled the induction speech for his late pal at the Hall, where Eisenhower was enshrined in the Lifetime Achievement category. Palmer showed up wearing a pin reading, "I still like Ike," a nod to Eisenhower's presidential campaign slogan of the 1950s.
For a guy known more for his time as a five-star general who called the shots in the European Theater in World War II, this was a fitting salute of another sort. Ike, who took up the game at the advanced age 35 and helped popularize it alongside celebrities like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, was hopelessly hooked.
"It was an obsession with him to do well," Palmer said.
Like with many of the game's true aficionados, it bordered more on addiction.
At Augusta, there's a tree and a pond named after Ike, plus the cabin. Ike was spraying it around long before Palmer launched the game to the next level via television. Eisenhower put up practice nets in the basement of the White House and had a practice green, built with help from the USGA, added outside his office door. He was a full-blown fiend.
One estimate claimed when Ike took office in 1953, there were 3.2 million Americans playing golf, a number that doubled over his eight years in the presidential saddle. Perhaps because of the unique pressures associated with his job, golf was an outlet. For some of us, it's the other way around.
Ike had heart troubles his whole life, but the infuriating game never gave him pause.
"Without golf now, he'd be like a caged lion, with all these tensions building up inside him," his former physician, Major General Howard Snyder, once said. "If this fellow couldn't play golf, I'd have a nut case on my hands."
He was just whacko over the game itself instead. Posthumously, he was inducted with Lanny Wadkins, Spain's Jose Maria Olazabal and Irish-born great Christy O'Connor Sr. While Eisenhower never broke 80, Palmer said he helped lead the most important growth spurt in the game's popularity.
"This is an opportunity that I welcome very much, and to say that the president, or Ike, or whatever you'd like to call it, the General, if there was anyone that really should be in the Hall of Fame, I think he should be," Palmer said before the induction ceremony. "He was an avid golfer, and the part of his life that he had the opportunity to play golf was probably as happy a part of his life as he had ever spent."
Eisenhower and Palmer, whose aggressive playing style helped put the game on the front of the sports section, because friends almost immediately. Before the 1958 Masters, Eisenhower called Augusta chairman Cliff Roberts and asked if he could arrange a round the day after the tournament ended with the winner.
"Well, as it turned out, when I won, Cliff Roberts very early after the tournament ended came to me, and he said, 'Arnie, the president wants to come and play golf with you tomorrow if you can get your schedule straightened out,'" Palmer recalled. "I said, 'Well, if he can get his schedule straightened out, I think I can get mine straightened out.' "It happened, and we became, in one day, pretty close. We talked about things other than golf. We talked about everything."
For her husband's birthday in 1966, Winnie Palmer arranged for Ike to fly into Latrobe, Pa., on the sly. Ike rang the doorbell, caught Palmer completely flat-footed and said with a smirk, "Say, you wouldn't have room to put up an old man for the night, would you?"
They once teamed in an alternate-shot exhibition at Merion outside Philadelphia against Jimmy Demaret and actor Ray Bolger. Palmer recalls talking Ike into using the General's tee shot so Eisenhower could hit the birdie putt on the first hole, and Ike rolled in a 15-footer for a birdie. He grinned like the Germans had signed the peace treaty.
"You can't imagine the joy he got out of that," Palmer said.
At Ike's exhibition booth in the Hall of Fame are a set of old Spalding clubs, with General Ike stamped in the irons, that Palmer now owns. Eisenhower joined Augusta National in 1948 and had a home in Palm Springs, where he and Palmer used to tip back a few cold ones and tell tall tales. Ike, a West Point man, was in many regards an Average Joe, a regular guy, in what was perceived to be an elitist sport.
"So regular, it was hard to imagine that he did all the things that he did in his life, he was so regular," Palmer said wistfully. "Everything he did he excelled in, from being a soldier to being a commander, a leader. I can tell you that if he had started golf a little sooner than he did, he would have been a really good player."
Instead, Ike was mostly a bogey golfer who shot in the mid-80s. Palmer recalls playing with Eisenhower in Pennsylvania in the former president's latter years when he had a crack at breaking 80 and fell apart under pressure. He led the Normandy invasion, but when he had a chance to shoot in the 70s, he gagged like the rest of us.
"He got so doggone excited, I think he got nervous and blew the 80, shot about 82," Palmer laughed. "But he was so excited about the possibility of breaking 80. And I don't know that he ever did."
It didn't matter. Ike was the first president of the modern era to publicly proclaim his devotion to the sport. It got the point that noted golf scribe Herbert Warren Wind, a Hall of Famer himself, wrote: "There was more than a little consternation on the part of baseball's drum-beaters that the president was undermining their game's historic status as the national pastime."
Ike might have been a leader of many men, but in the greatest game of all, he was just a relative civilian, fighting for crumbs. At the 17th hole at Augusta, a tree bearing his name stands on the left side of the fairway, some 210 yards from the tee. Eisenhower, a notorious slicer, hit the tree so often it was named after him, not exactly as a tribute.
Once, he lobbied at a club meeting to have the pine tree chain-sawed to the ground, but Roberts summarily shot him down. Roberts ruled that Ike was out of order, quickly adjourned the meeting and declared the issue closed.
Eisenhower played the game well into his elderly years, saving the best for last, really, recording his first hole-in-one in 1968 at age 77. He died 13 months later. The 1969 Masters was held one week after his death. Roberts delivered a fitting eulogy of sorts that should not be forgotten, even 40 years later.
Said Roberts: "Very few contributed as much as General Eisenhower toward the popularity of golf."
