Arnold Palmer won four Masters during his career, but he looks just as good wearing a red blazer at Cherry Hills Country Club as he does sporting a green jacket at Augusta National.
Perhaps that has something to do with what Palmer accomplished on the afternoon of June 18, 1960 at Cherry Hills, just south of Denver: driving the green on the par-4 first hole, shooting a final-round 65 after trailing by seven strokes, fending off greats of the past (Ben Hogan) and the future (Jack Nicklaus), and winning his first and only U.S. Open.
Coming during a season Golf World magazine recently called “The Greatest Year in Golf,” it was a Saturday that will go down in the game’s lore.
Not surprisingly, with the 50th anniversary of Palmer’s feat upon us, Cherry Hills will celebrate what happened a half-century ago. Palmer, an honorary lifetime member of Cherry Hills, will be at the club Sunday night (June 13) for a private dinner with club members and other invited guests. Also among those taking part in the festivities will be Jack Fleck, who tied for third in the 1960 Open, and one-time noted singer Don Cherry, a talented amateur who placed ninth. Nicklaus couldn’t attend, but has conveyed some thoughts via correspondence.
“It’s going to be a special evening,” Cherry Hills head professional John Ogden said. “We have a lot of people who were there (for the 1960 U.S. Open). We’re excited to have Mr. Palmer back. It’ll be fun.”
Palmer, now 80, spent most of a week at Cherry Hills late last spring as part of the Palmer Cup, the college version of the Ryder Cup. During that visit, Arnie reminisced at length about arguably his most memorable victory. Some have gone so far as to call it “Golf’s Greatest Championship,” the name of a book Julian Graubart wrote about the 1960 U.S. Open.
It wasn’t just Palmer’s phenomenal final round that made that U.S. Open stand out. It was also the convergence of three generations of golf’s finest players. Palmer, the 47-year-old Hogan and a 20-year amateur named Nicklaus were all in contention coming down the stretch.
Nicklaus finished second, two strokes behind Palmer. Hogan shared ninth place after hitting a ball into the water on the 71st hole and taking bogey, then finishing with a triple bogey, ending up four behind Arnie.
“It was my only (U.S.) Open win; it was the highlight of my career,” Palmer said last year at Cherry Hills. “I’d won the Masters in 1958 and 1960 in squeakers, then I won the Open by two shots, and it was a good shot (in the arm) for me.”
Palmer probably has told the story many hundreds of times, but it always seems entertaining. Back in 1960, the final two rounds of the U.S. Open were both played on Saturday. After the first round that day, Arnie trailed leader Mike Souchak by seven strokes, and many people wrote off his chances to win, including Pittsburgh Press sports writer Bob Drum, a friend of Palmer. The two had lunch in the lockerroom between rounds.
“I said, “˜Bob, if I shoot 65, do you think that will win,” Palmer recounted of their conversation. After initially ignoring Palmer, Drum said, “Nothing’s going to help you.”
Palmer, using that as motivation, made a big move from the start in the final round. He smacked a driver onto the green on the 346-yard first hole and made birdie. The club Arnie used for his famous shot was given to him by Hogan at the 1960 Masters. It was, of course, a Hogan driver, but because of his equipment endorsement deals at the time, Palmer admits “making it look like a Wilson driver.”
Nowadays, it wouldn’t be extraordinary for an elite player to drive a 346-yard hole at Cherry Hills, but with the equipment back then, and the relatively soft ball Arnie used at the time, it was quite a blow.
“To hit it as far as I did was just lucky,” he said.
Palmer, with six birdies in his first seven holes, quickly moved up the leaderboard that afternoon, but Hogan and Nicklaus, paired together, were very much in contention coming down the stretch. Hogan, who had hit his first 34 greens of the day in regulation, was tied for the lead going into the 17th hole. But he saw his hopes sink when he spun a wedge back off the green into the water surrounding the green on the par-5.
Twenty-three years later, Hogan confided to CBS, “I find myself waking up at night thinking of that shot right today. There isn’t a month that goes by that that doesn’t cut my guts out.”
After the lead changed hands a dozen times in the final round, Palmer came out on top in the end. He celebrated his final-round charge to victory with the famous toss of his visor high into the air. Skip Manning, an 11-year-old at the time, grabbed the visor and held onto it for 48 years until presenting it to Palmer in person in 2008. The headwear then went to the USGA Museum.
Not long after winning at Cherry Hills, Palmer traveled with Drum to St. Andrews in Scotland for the British Open. In a conversation the two had, Arnie noted that an amateur would never duplicate Bobby Jones’ Grand Slam of 1930, when he won the U.S. Amateur, British Amateur, U.S. Open and British Open. So Palmer broached the idea of a new Grand Slam — the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship. Drum picked up on the idea , wrote about it shortly before the British Open and “it caught on right away,” Palmer said.
Arnie, of course, had a shot at running the major championship table in 1960. But after wins in the Masters and U.S. Open, he finished a shot behind champion Kel Nagle at the British Open.
Palmer would go on to win the British Open the next two years. Though he would finish second in the U.S. Open four times from 1962 through ’67, his 1960 victory would be his only U.S. Open title.
