I’ve been fascinated this week watching a golf tournament. It’s the Masters and I hope “you know who” wins it because he’s come close several times and looks like he choked the first round although I’m not sure any of that is true. I’m recording this on Sunday morning very, very early and being on Sunday morning I can’t give you the final results but anyway, I hope that’s the way it goes. It would make me happy!
What a tournament that is! The Masters is unlike any other and I don’t know how to describe it except that it’s not like any others I’ve seen! I think I did a program about a year or two back about the golf tournaments that I’ve seen and everything. I know I did one about the way I kept score so I don’t want to do any of that.
I did see a live round of golf. It was the closing holes of the Texas Open in 1960 and you can look it up if you want to. I got there with a couple of friends and drove into San Antonio. We had no idea where the golf tournament was but we got hung up in the traffic and we found out where it was. We were on top of it and it was not a thrill like it would be today. I had never seen one. In 1960 not everybody had a TV and certainly not like today.
Well, anyway, I had one idol in golf and they didn’t show it on TV. You saw the highlights. I went totally silent like in reverence to him – Arnold Palmer. He was the one and only golfer in that season of my….whatever you call it. I was literally eaten up with the guy. I would dress like him. I would try to shoot like him and you could imagine it was a mess. Palmer was leading the Texas Open and about the tenth hole I caught up with him. If they had TV back then, they didn’t have a whole lot of rules. They shot and you followed them. The thing that disappointed me that day, didn’t really disappoint me, was that he was a heavy smoker. I mean a HEAVY smoker. I asked somebody how many he had smoked and he really smoked about one per hole. I don’t think he ever took one to the next hole, but he would suck those things down. I’ve just never seen anybody smoke like that. I hope he eased off in the ‘70s, ‘80s, 90’s and 2000s. He was probably more dramatic with his cigarettes than anything else. I was pretty close to him. Never got to shake hands with him but I got to cheer him two or three times as he won the Texas Open! Good for him! I say good for him! That stuff, even though it was not on anyone’s radar at the time, but if you smoked you didn’t say something about it like you do now days and he did smoke a bunch.
I guess it was that tournament and we are going home from San Antonio. I told the guys, “You’re not going to believe what I heard.” I said, “You won’t believe what the guy is getting! He played seventy-two holes of golf and you know how much he got for it? Ten thousand dollars.” I said, “Man alive! Ten grand and he got every bit of it and it probably cost him about that much in cigarettes.” There’s no telling how many cigarettes he smoked that day, but he got it back probably on the ads. He smoked some cigarette and any time you talked about Arnold Palmer you talked about him with those cigarettes. Ten thousand dollars!
At the Masters today, it would boggle your mind, boggle your mind at the Masters, at what place would get ten grand. I thought that was the most money in the world – $10,000. Arnold Palmer had it. He was born in the wrong time. The winner of the Masters, I think it’s like three million dollars or something like that. Unbelievable!
Times are changing and time waits for no one.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].