Quiet Drum Still Resonates

Well, I won’t be going to the U.S. Open this week. (Sob!) Tell them to start without me.

There are a couple of reasons I won’t miss it that much. One is the Washington, D.C., summer.

The other is, they won’t have Bob Drum there. The Drummer missed the cut last year. Cancer. A par five none of us can handle.

So, it would be the first Open I ever attended where there was no Bob Drum there. It almost isn’t a major without him.

The great Dan Jenkins once said of him that he was “the guy who invented Arnold Palmer.”

He didn’t. Arnold Palmer invented Arnold Palmer. Whom Bob Drum invented was Bob Drum. You had to know him to believe him.

He had the vocabulary of a pirate’s parrot. But he was a man who never missed Sunday Mass. He had the bombast of Brooklyn in his speech, and when he was in a room, you knew it. As with all Brooklynites or Manhattanites, the “r” disappeared completely from his native burr and a golf tournament became a “taw-nament.”

He was as wide as he was tall, and he was 6-feet-something, an ex-football player. He lived life in gulps. He was a prodigious drinker, but the alcohol was overmatched by his very bulk. You never saw Drum really drunk. Belligerent. But not drunk.

He had a very low tolerance for phoniness, and you weighed what you said around the Drummer. He could cut you down to size in a hurry.

He loved golf. But he’d never admit it. The Arnold Palmer myth grew up because Drum was the golf writer for the Pittsburgh Press when Palmer was birdieing his way out of Latrobe.

Drum was Irish-American but not professionally so. He was as unpredictable as a mosquito. You relied on him at your peril. He came into a room like a runaway truck. He didn’t carry on a conversation, he led it. He considered the eighth deadly sin was to be boring.

He found the human condition endlessly funny. He never expected more of his fellow man than he could give. Drum knew the world was full of rogues and fools--and some of them made a living with nine-irons, still others with a typewriter. Drum spent life in a comfortable chair with a vodka and a view of the 18th green.

The signature story about Drummer was told by Jenkins in a golf magazine years ago. “How Bob Drum and I Invented Arnold Palmer,” it was titled. It has Drum orating, “Arnold D. Palmer is the next great chin in golf. He makes 4,567 birdies a day.” Exaggeration was always a big part of the Drum arsenal. Jenkins quotes him as raising a toast to Palmer and golf, “You were the greatest at it, Bubba. There was no such sport till you came along.”

But when Palmer teed off that historic day in 1960 for the final round of the only U.S. Open he would win, he asked Drum if he was coming along. “I’m tired of watching duck hooks,” Jenkins quotes Drummer’s reply. “You’ll finish 14th.”

Palmer, of course, finished first. Drum was equal to the occasion. “Hogan put it in the water,” he shrugged. “He does that every 21 years or so. Are you always this lucky?”

It was vintage Drum. He bowed to one God. When a Brit golfer once harrumphed, “You’re aptly named, Drum. Loud, pompous and full of hot air,” Drum laughed loudest. “I’ll put it on my epitaph,” he said delightedly. “These Limeys have a way with words.”

You never mentioned his name without a smile coming to your lips. Even when he was short on money--which was most of the time--he came to golf’s marquee events. He unceremoniously bunked with me one year at Winged Foot and, when I came home, shaken, at 2 in the morning after I had gotten hopelessly lost driving through the roughest part of New York City with a wad of money but out of gas, Drum was typically unsympathetic when I roused him from his sleep. “Serves you right,” he snorted. “When you get off the fairway, you pay a penalty. You had a chance to be dead.” And he went back to sleep.

He once referred to the wife of a colleague who got a bit tired of waiting on their demanding house guest as “a testy little par three over water.” He once introduced a stiff-upper-lip British colleague at a party saying, “If he were any more British, he couldn’t talk at all.”

He had a cameo role in the golf telecasts for a few seasons. It was fun stuff. Andy Rooney was never funnier. It was a delightful adjunct to the tournament of the week, but I guess the network geniuses preferred guys who added to the language by saying, “He doesn’t have much green to work with.”

The Drummer didn’t pick up or put a “WD” on the card. He went out as he had lived, going for the green. He went to tournaments disobeying doctors’ orders to the last.

He would have welcomed the Tiger Woods Era. The sociological implications would have bored him, but the fact the Game (Drum always thought of it as a capital G) had a new man whose ball to play off would have delighted him. He deplored the distressing anonymity the game had undergone. “Everybody’s playing for the money out there,” he griped. “A bunch of cost accountants. They might as well be playing cards.” Even then, it would be “I’ll play these” with these guys.

I hope wherever he is today they have a satellite feed for the Open and a press tent with an open bar. And a leader board he approved of.

I remember one Open at Winged Foot, he devised a new exotic way to bet. You could bet “any Tom” and you would get Watson, Weiskopf, Purtzer. If you picked “any Miller,” you got Johnny, Allen or even Miller Barber. As the tournament wore on, it became evident the winner would be the veteran Hale Irwin. Drum barged into the press room. “Anybody got ‘any Hale’?” he wanted to know.

He always marched to his own Drummer.