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did in that trailer.
    â€œAfter Augusta we came home, right here to Latrobe, and pulled that trailer in my father’s backyard and parked it,” Arnold said. “And Winnie looked at me and said, ‘You know how much I love you. I’ll do anything you want to do. But I will never go with you in a trailer again.’ ”
    There was a beautiful portrait of Winnie on a nearby wall, her hair swooped back. She looked like a Breck Girl.
    â€œThe trailer never went again.”
    Arnold looked right at us. The silver hair, the massive head, the creased face. This was not cocktail chatter. It was his life.
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    I was struck by Arnold’s coarse, plain language, by its Rat Pack cool and economy. His golf ball was “that son of a bitch.” The old pro Dutch Harrison, a gambler, got Arnold into a big-bucks pro-am and wanted a “kickback.” The Hall of Famer Tommy Bolt “was so bad.” A double-date fishing trip with Bolt and his wife, Shirley, ended with the two of them “throwing knives at each other” and Arnold saying to Winnie, “Babe, we gotta split.” On the road out, they saw Bolt’s own son “thumbing.” Regarding the successful Latrobe lumberman for whom Palmer had caddied as a kid: “I hung close.” He called himself “dumber than a rock.” (Fat chance.) When he made money in a Calcutta gambling game, he was “as happy as a dog going to a farting contest with six assholes.” His great college friend Bud Worsham was a “bad drinker” and Arnold had to “pull him out of ditches.” (Bud, along with a Wake Forest basketball player, died in a late-night car accident when Arnold was a senior.) Arnold got his “ass kicked” on the course by so-and-so. He remembered Bobby Jones once telling him, “If I ever need an eight-foot putt for my life, you’re going to putt it.” For my life . They played for high stakes.
    Mike asked Arnold if there was a party in Latrobe after he won his first tour event, the 1955 Canadian Open.
    â€œNo,” Arnold said. “It was quiet.”
    You can see clips from that win in the Arnold Palmer Room at the USGA museum in the New Jersey horse country. It also has home movies of Arnold, Arnold doing a Pennzoil ad, Arnold holing out on the eighteenth green on Sunday at Augusta in ’58, when he won the first of his four titles there. You can see skinny Ken Venturi on the green with him, warmly congratulating him. The scene, in black and white, has a certain timeless grace.
    Mike and I sat there listening to Arnold checking off all these old names. I knew most of them, and Mike knew every last one. Dutch Harrison, Dick Mayer, Tommy Bolt, Billy Casper. Ky Laffoon, Porky Oliver. Gene Littler. Hogan and Nelson and Snead. The Worsham brothers and Skip Alexander. (Mike played golf for his son, Buddy Alexander, at Georgia Southern.) Ed Furgol. Harvie Ward. Fred Hawkins. Al Besselink. Mike and I once spent half a day with Besselink, a tour star from the fifties with a loaf of yellow hair. Bessie was a habitué of the South Florida golf scene but also well known at the betting windows at Gulfstream and Hialeah. Mike had been quoting for years something Bessie told us that day: “Don’t date no brokes.”
    â€œI’ll never forget this,” Arnold said. “Winnie and I are driving from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. We’re watching the car in front of us. All of a sudden sparks are coming out of the back of that car. I’m watching. And I thought, I’m seeing something that I don’t understand .
    â€œI pulled up closer to them and there’s Besselink hanging out of the back door of the car, grinding a wedge on the highway. That’s what the sparks were.”
    You could see it like it was in a movie.
    â€œIt really happened,” Arnold said.
    â€œAl Besselink’s a crazy man,” Mike