A present that endured

Santa came up big on one special Christmas

By early afternoon on Christmas Day in 1969, I was on the grounds of the Campbell House several blocks from our house in Southern Pines. The grass fields might be called “green space” these days, but to kids of that time they were just a place to play ball. It was a cold winter day for the Sandhills of North Carolina, the temperature not rising out of the low 40s. With a toboggan over my crew cut and wearing my thickest sweatshirt, though, I was prepared for the elements.

I already had hit some plastic golf balls in our yard. A bag of 24 ran 99 cents at the Western Auto and buying in bulk was smart the way gutters and bushes gobbled them up. But what Santa Claus had left for me that morning called for full swings with the real thing.

Ten years old, I was falling harder for golf all the time and had wanted this starter set of clubs in the Sears catalog for months. They were Johnny Palmer signature models by Spalding: four irons (3, 5, 7, 9), two woods (1, 3) and a putter that came with a red and black bag. Sixty dollars was a lot of money for my family in those days. When I came into the living room and saw them under the tree, I felt like the luckiest boy in Moore County.

I didn’t know a thing about Johnny Palmer, the much less well-known professional golfer with that surname. Only much later would I find out that Johnny won seven PGA events between 1946 and 1954 and flirted with winning a PGA Championship (second) and Masters (fourth) and was one of the finest golfers to come from North Carolina. He grew up in Badin, an hour or so away from Southern Pines and had been born in 1918 in Eldorado, birthplace of my maternal grandfather.

The Christmas I received the clubs bearing Johnny Palmer’s signature, they seemed shinier than the brightest diamond. As I walked up Ridge Street to the Campbell House with a paper sack of golf balls and the 5- and 9-iron from my new set, I was careful not to let the clubheads strike the pavement as I carried them to our de facto neighborhood range. I was prone to topping the ball in those days, and I’m sure I thinned a few more than usual that day because I didn’t want to dirty them up. When I got home, I hosed them off outside. That evening, I putted on the carpet toward table legs with my new blade, which was better than something at miniature golf but not quite as slick as Spalding’s legendary “Cash-in.”

My first set of clubs bore the name of pro golf’s lesser-known Palmer. (Bill Fields)

Many decades on from that special Christmas I had a chance to say hello to Johnny Palmer at the Legends of Golf, then played in Savannah, and tell him what those clubs with his name on them had meant to me as I began a lifetime around the game. He didn’t say much, but I remember he smiled, if not quite as broadly as I had upon realizing Santa had come through big-time.

I used those Johnny Palmers for a couple of years until I saved up and bought a used full set from a retiree with whom I played sometimes. My dad then used the starter set for a while as he got into golf before graduating to a complete kit. Then some of them ended up with my brother-in-law, Bob, who was mostly a tennis player but swung my first clubs during his infrequent rounds.

A few years ago, feeling nostalgic, I asked my sister to see if she could look in her basement for the four irons that I knew her husband, who had passed away, had borrowed. She found them and shipped them to me. Having kept the driver and putter all these years, I now had them back together except the 3-wood. The irons were pretty banged up—but at least some of the lines of the soles showed an inside-to-outside path! After a lot of deliberation, I decided to spend way too much money and get them refurbished. They are as shiny as they were when I first spied them on Christmas morning. Now as then, I don’t want to get them dirty.