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Excerpts from A Golfer's Life chapter one "Good Hands" "My two earliest memories involve my father and my hands. I was three years old and we were living in a small house across the street from my paternal grandparents, Alex and Agnes Palmer...At that time my father was the head greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club, which he'd helped build with his own hands in the years just prior to my birth in September 1929. As an economic measure to combat the effects of the Great Depression, he would soon also be made "temporary" head professional by the club's directors – a job he managed to keep, and perform tirelessly, for forty years until his death in 1976. My father, Milfred Jerome Palmer, was the oldest, followed by Uncle Francis, or "Spook," and their kid brother, Harry, or "Dude," Palmer. Exactly how my father got his nickname – "Deacon" or, more commonly, "Deke" – remains a bit of a family mystery. Sometime back when he was a young man, he apparently helped out a local black minister in some kind of trouble, and people took to calling him "Deacon." Perhaps the name was bestowed in derision or jest. No one knows for sure, and my father certainly wasn't going to discuss it. In his view, someone else's troubles were their own business, not a proper subject for public discussion. ...our father really was a caretaker to many people around town. A man who took care of people regardless of their background or race. A deacon with strong hands. So the name stuck, and it suited him. As I say, most people simply called him Deke. I called him Pap from the beginning. I began this reflection by saying I had two earliest memories involving Pap and hands. Here is the other one: When I was three, my father put my hands in his and placed them around the shaft of a cut-down women's golf club. He showed me the classic overlap, or Vardon, grip – the proper grip for a good golf swing, he said – and told me to hit the golf ball. Because the Vardon grip involves overlapping the small finger of one hand on the index finger of the other, it's not the easiest grip for a small-fry to master. But an easier, baseball, grip would never have done, so I worked hard to learn the grip Pap showed me. It probably helped that my hands were larger than the average kid's. His initial thoughts on the golf swing weren't complicated, though. "Hit it hard, boy," he said simply. "Go find it and hit it hard again." I simply wanted good hands like his, the hands that shaped Latrobe Country Club." |
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