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I knew from Chicago,” Arnold said. “And she was a good-looking broad.”
    The phrase good-looking broad , by the way, does not appear in A Golfer’s Life .
    â€œAnd I’m engaged now to Winnie. I was out with the model that evening, and I got back to the hotel where my dad was. And it was late.
    â€œHe said, ‘Where in the hell have you been?’
    â€œMy father was tough. He was no patsy. And I told him I had run into this lady.
    â€œMy father says, ‘Arnie, you’re engaged. You make up your mind. Are you going to play the tour? Are you going to quit screwing around? Where’s your fiancée?’
    â€œI said, ‘She’s in Coopersburg.’
    â€œHe said, ‘Well, you get your ass up there and get her and get going on what you’re going to do.’
    â€œI said, ‘What do you mean?’
    â€œHe says, ‘You take the car and go get Winnie and decide what you want to do.’
    â€œSo I went to Coopersburg and four days later I was married. We went to Washington, where my sister was, got a marriage license, and got married. We came here for the holidays.”
    Christmas in Latrobe, 1954. Their honeymoon night was spent at a motel for truckers off the Breezewood exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
    Get your ass up there . People my age and younger don’t even know how to use the word ass anymore, but older people do. My father, the least vulgar of men and the most encouraging of fathers, once criticized my boyhood leaf-raking with “That’s a half-assed job.” Today a parent who dares to be critical is shunned during the cookie portion of parent-teacher night. The real truth is that my father wasn’t being critical. He was teaching me something. Arnold’s father, the same. Deacon Palmer didn’t care how good-looking that Chicago model was.
    I asked Arnold about earlier girlfriends, if he had ever been close to getting married before meeting Winnie.
    â€œWell, I fucked a few,” Arnold said. “But I never wanted to marry them.”
    Arnold was going off-script. He knew he was not portraying himself as a saint. But he was doing something better and more useful. He was telling a story that was actually believable. I think he wanted us to know the real story of when Arnie met Winnie. For our benefit, for yours, and for his own, too. You know what they say: The truth will set you free.
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    In his own way, Arnold expressed a deep love for his life with Winnie.
    He said, “Winnie did what I wanted to do. She worked with me all the time. She didn’t mind if I was practicing. And I practiced a lot. She came and watched me. And it was great.”
    Okay, Winnie was in a subservient role, no question about that. But in 1954 nobody was talking about feminism, at least not within the confines of the mainstream American marriage. My parents, I’m sure, had about the same setup. In 1954 Father Knows Best had just come on TV; Gloria Steinem, Winnie’s age exactly, was an undergraduate at Smith; and Mr. and Mrs. Arnold D. Palmer were conjoined by elopement.
    And it was great .
    Would Winnie have said the same? We can’t know. Different answers at different times, in all likelihood. As in any marriage. Right then, Arnold was remembering their early days when they shared a dream known only to them, the road in front of them was wide open, and anything seemed possible.
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    Christmas 1954 segued into the new year and the start of his rookie season. Arnold told us how he and Winnie started traveling the tour in a four-door Ford, lugging a trailer behind them. The first trailer, which died young, was nineteen feet long. The next model was a twenty-seven-footer, a home on wheels that toured all of California and the west, crossed the country to Florida, migrated north from there to Augusta. For nearly four months, everything Arnie and Winnie did, they