Double, Double Toil And Trouble

The Bing Crosby National Pro-Amateur Championship has one of the highest ratings of all televised golf shows, so it is completely fitting that the host and nature should conspire to make the most of the game's dramatic possibilities. Last week, in the climatic wilds of Monterey Peninsula, the pair outdid themselves. The 24th renewal of the Crosby was played in weather that would have made the witches of Macbeth flee their caldrons and fly for cover, and when it was over young Bruce Crampton, as handsome a leading man as any drama could hope to cast, was the winner. Understandably pleased with his role, Crampton stood on the 18th green Sunday afternoon smiling broadly, but the rest of the world's best pros were hardly as calm. They would long remember the 1965 Crosby as the kind of place from which a fellow—such as Doug Sanders (left)—was lucky to escape alive.

The weather is a topic of conversation that inundates the Crosby, year in, year out and year around, as if the tournament were a meteorological convention instead of a sports event. There is no real reason the weather should be frightful—Monterey Peninsula is not always insufferable in January—but somehow the Crosby climate reacts to the attention it receives, behaving like an old trouper who refuses to abandon stage center. This year it greeted the players on the first morning of the tournament with some glorious midwinter sunshine, forcing the golfers and gallery to shuck their mackintoshes, tweeds and Shetland pullovers and laugh at the official forecasters, who had predicted storms. By mid-afternoon the tweeds and Shetlands and mackintoshes were back on, for the duration, and the laughs were over. Only Arnold Palmer had the nerve to joke about the weather after that, and he should not have. On Friday morning, having just birdied the first hole, he looked at the angry clouds scudding a few feet overhead and started singing "Oh, what a beautiful mornin' " on his way to the 2nd tee. He was so engrossed in song that he tripped over a low strand of wire and fell on his face. He did not have another birdie all day. But the next afternoon, with the wind howling and TV towers collapsing and his score a shambles, Arnold got some measure of revenge. On the 545-yard 18th hole at Pebble Beach he hit what looked like a laugh of a golf shot, a three-wood that he aimed out over the ocean in the general direction of Tokyo. As he watched patiently, the ball went 50 yards out to sea, and the wind then blew it back to the front of the green. This unforgettable effort brought him one of the three birdies scored on the hole all day.

Whenever the talk at this Crosby switched from the weather to golf, it was likely to move to that other most interesting subject, one that never seems to bore the followers of tournament pros, the Palmer-Nicklaus rivalry. By now the pros are taking the regency of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus pretty much for granted. One even hears such irreverent remarks as that of the pro who said: "I'm sick of them." But Palmer at the age of 35 and Nicklaus at 25 show no more signs of stepping aside than does Charles de Gaulle. Now, with Nicklaus playing his first tournament of 1965, the rivalry was being assessed again.

It is always a surprise to rediscover how very young Jack Nicklaus is in view of his superb record during his first three years as a pro. This was emphasized on the opening day of the Crosby, because it was Jack's 25th birthday. Everyone on the golf course seemed to know it. When Nicklaus reached the tee of the 16th hole on Cypress Point, where he played his first round, the gallery encamped on the hillside above broke out in a dissonant rendition of Happy Birthday.

Having reached the quarter-century mark, Nicklaus was in a mood at the Crosby to reflect momentarily on himself and his future. "My ambition," he said quite frankly, "is to be the greatest golfer who ever lived, just as it is Arnold's ambition and everyone else's who plays the game seriously. But we have different ways of going at it. Arnold wants to win the Grand Slam, or what they now call the Grand Slam [the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA], because he would like to do something that no one has ever done before. I don't yet know what I would have to do to become the greatest. But I think Sam Snead was wrong when he said publicly the other day that I have reached my peak, though I believe I have an idea what he means.

"When I think of being the greatest golfer, I remind myself that I am only 25, whereas Arnold didn't reach his peak until he was 29 and Hogan until he was 36. Right now I think you would have to say that Hogan was the best ever. That is the goal, but I don't know how you get there. Maybe I could win the Grand Slam, but what would I do after that if I was still young?" Jack laughed. "Win two Grand Slams?"

With 10 years of seniority on Nicklaus, Palmer's future is well past the analyzing stage. This year, for instance, he expects to play in only about 15 tournaments—all the major championships, including the British Open—and devote considerably more time to his Arnold Palmer Company. "But that's just for this year," Arnold will remind you. "Maybe next year I'll go back to playing a lot more tournaments." Every wrinkle in his forehead seems to expose the main thought that lurks there: Grand Slam.

Only two golfers at the Crosby appeared really capable of challenging Palmer and Nicklaus through the year ahead. One is Bill Casper Jr., a self-contained and soft-spoken 33-year-old who has been in the forefront of tournament golf just as long as Palmer and is second only to Arnold in the list of alltime money winners. Casper is on the finest streak of his auspicious career, having finished ninth or better in his last 16 tournaments, a remarkable show of consistency dating back to June of last year.

The other heir-hopeful at the top of most lists is Tony Lema. He is a wise and thoughtful golfer who understands what he is doing whenever he hits a shot, a talent that is rarer than one might think among the 30 or 40 professional golfers who are good enough to win a PGA event. As Dave Marr puts it, "When Casper or Lema go out to play a round they don't worry about how they are going to hit the ball. They know they are hitting it well, and the way they score depends pretty much on the kind of breaks they get. That's a hell of an advantage."

There was no particular reason to think on Thursday that you would have to look past this quartet to find the winner of the Crosby—but you could be sure some strange things would happen before any of them, or anybody else, would be listening to Bing's gags and accepting the top money of $7,500 late Sunday afternoon.