Any Day Is Arnie's Day

When the greens are soggy with rain, when the sun bakes fairways hard as concrete, when stampeding galleries block the path to the pin, when the cash is on the barrelhead, then the grim men who play big-time golf for a living are apt to mutter: "It's a Palmer day." So Much Green. This year, any day is Arnie Palmer's day. Not since Bobby Jones won the U.S. and British amateurs, the U.S. and British opens in his "Grand Slam" year of 1930 has one player so dominated the game of golf. With 14 tournaments and six victories behind him, $59,308 already in his pocket and the golden summer tour still ahead, Palmer (TIME Cover, May 2, 1960) is virtually assured of becoming the richest golfer of all time.

No one has ever won so many tournaments so early in the season: the record for victories in a single season is 19, and that was set by Byron Nelson in 1945, when many pros were away in service. No one has ever won so much money so early; when Palmer set the one-year record ($75,263) in 1960, he had picked up only $48,000 by the middle of May. In one furious, six-week stretch that culminated with his play-off victory over Johnny Pott last week in the Colonial National Invitational, Palmer won four tournaments. Said Pott: "He's just too tough.

They ought to put a 20-lb. weight on him, handicap him like a race horse, to give the rest of us a chance." At 32, Palmer is a hero out of Runyon --a passionate gambler, an electric showman. His desire to win is so strong that finishing second--even though it makes him rich--is only a little less distasteful than finishing last. "The desire is the thing," he says. "You have to keep yourself under control, to believe in yourself.

If you know you can't make a shot, then you shouldn't try it. But when you start getting cautious, you start to lose." Nobody has ever accused Palmer of caution. On the course, he is a duffer's delight: when his putts hang on the lip and his drives stray, Palmer bangs his clubs against the turf, twists his face into a grimace of pain, mutters angrily: "Stop hitting like a woman!" or "Head down, head down, for God's sake!" It is at the crucial moments, when most golfers get rattled and come unstrung, that Palmer plays his best golf. "When I have a feeling that I might lose, it charges me up," he says. "It gives me added incentive. I just tell myself to try harder. It's a little like bleeding. First you have to stop the blood --then you try to heal the wound." Perfection. This year Palmer seems to have mended the only noticeable flaw in his game: his tendency to scatter his booming 300-yd. drives. "There's no such thing as perfection in golf," he says. "I'm playing better, and the main improve ment is in my driving accuracy. I'm not hitting the ball any further, but I'm posi tioning it better. I've changed my swing.

I tee the ball higher, and I hit through it instead of down at it. I always wanted to be able to hit my drives to the exact spot I had in mind. Now I'm coming closer."

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