Everything Is a Memory in the End: Recalling Moments With Arnold Palmer at the Honda Classic
PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.—“You must have some great memories of the Honda Classic,” a tournament volunteer prompted this morning, having overheard that I was a retired sportswriter with roots in Palm Beach County.
“I’ve got a few,” I said, reluctant to admit that the 2002 edition of this tournament, won by a very young Matt Kuchar, was my only time covering Florida’s second-oldest PGA Tour event.
Neither of us said anything for a moment, until I realized that she was waiting for an example. “Oh, well, there’s so many.” I ransacked my brain for anecdotes. “Sam Snead, you know, with his straw hat and that glorious swing, doing, uh, the Sam Snead thing. George Bayer! He hit it a mile! And I’ll never forget Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote Stardust and Georgia On My Mind, but a fine amateur golfer who was a regular at PGA events…”
That’s when I realized I wasn’t remembering the Honda Classic (1984-2023), or the Honda Inverrary Classic (1982-83), or the American Motors Inverrary Classic (1981), or even the rollicking Jackie Gleason-Inverrary Classic (1972-80), hosted by the star of “The Honeymooners.” No, my hazy impressions were from the 1960 West Palm Beach Open, won by the three-time Ryder Cupper, Johnny Pott.
Full disclosure: I was not a Sports Illustrated staffer in 1960. I was a 13-year-old 7th-grader at Palm Beach Junior High School, and I wasn’t even a reporter for my school newspaper, a mimeographed monthly. I was an unpaid correspondent for the Garrity family, covering the exploits of my brother Tom, the best player to come out of Kansas City in a generation. Ten years my senior and weighed down by a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, Tom Garrity was playing his third PGA tournament as a pro. Intimidated by the pointy-finned Cadillacs in the West Palm Beach Country Club parking lot, he parked his hail-dented ‘59 Mercury behind a giant banyan tree.
Those “great memories” I promised? One that stands out is of my brother, who slept that week on sofa cushions on the floor of our garage apartment, coming in with the newspaper while our divorced mom cooked breakfast. “Holy cow!” he said, checking the third-round pairings. “I’m playing with Arnold Palmer!” She nearly dropped a plate of bacon.
My third-round memories, while few, are vivid. West Palm Beach Country Club was a Dick Wilson design, dotted with coconut palms and pines. Its fairways were lined with spectators, especially for the marquee pairing of Palmer, Garrity and Art Wall, the 1959 Masters champ. A gray man nicknamed “the ribbon clerk,” Wall drew merely polite applause on the first tee. Arnie, of course, got the expected roar of approval for a two-time Masters champion and reigning U.S. Open title holder, mingled with offers from young women to bear his children.
Young Garrity got almost as enthusiastic a reception, having been a basketball star, Charleston champion and golf prodigy at Palm Beach High School. Justifiably nervous, he toed his drive up the right side, but not as far as Palmer, who punctuated his blast with that crouching, hands-low-and-left follow-through. Spectators ran up the fairway while Palmer’s ball was still in the air.
The first fairway frames my best anecdote. With a boisterous crowd and his little brother lined up behind him—this is before gallery ropes—Tom pulled a 5-iron from his Wilson staff bag. Palmer stood twenty yards further on at the edge of the left rough, puffing on a cigarette. (Everyone smoked back then; even the squirrels had emphysema.) Tom swung and pinched one off the turf, a low thunderbolt that climbed late in its flight before dropping like a stone—the signature ball flight of that period’s pros.
He wasn’t happy with the shot. Wrong club? Failure to account for the wind? Mulling it over, Tom stepped toward his caddie, forgetting to look both ways. “After I hit the shot I started to reach for my golf bag to get a cigarette,” he told me years later. “I almost lost my right hand as the crowd stampeded past me to get behind Palmer.” He laughed. “That’s when I learned that there are golfers … and there are Arnold Palmers.”
I got that message myself, a few holes later, when a tight-lipped Arnie turned away from a poor approach shot and slammed his club into the bag so hard that it rebounded a foot in the air.
For more prosaic memories of that weekend I have to rely on a contemporaneous issue of Golf Digest. It tells me Pott took the $2,000 winner’s prize with a four-round total of 10-under, 278, three strokes better than Snead; Cary Middlecoff shot 81-79 and missed the cut; Julius Boros withdrew after three rounds due to “a broken toe suffered when he fell off a couch”; Snead was visibly annoyed by Pott’s slow play; Hoagy Carmichael shot a final-round 75, good for low songwriter—and tour rookie Tom Garrity, with a line of 71-71-77-74—293, tied for 22nd and earned $160 for his efforts.
If the Honda Classic volunteer hadn’t hustled off on her duties, I would have shared more. The West Palm Beach Open, I would have said, lost its PGA Tour status in 1963, for reasons unknown to me. Nine years later, Gleason and the Tour launched their Broward County event, which moved to Palm Beach Gardens in 2003. Now Honda has dropped its sponsorship—revealing, I guess, that everything is a memory, in the end.
That said, I have some great anecdotes from the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, if anyone’s interested.