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Arnold Palmer at 80
The facts alone speak of one of the finest careers the history of professional golf: seven major championships, 55 other PGA Tour titles, 17 international victories, 15 senior wins, 22 points from six Ryder Cup appearances. The facts, though, are but a monochrome silhouette of that kaleidoscope of ability, achievement, influence, altruism and humility otherwise known as Arnold Palmer. The facts don’t even tell a fraction of the real story. They can’t, of course. For the real story is the story of just about every high-profile sport in the modern world. Golf, football (all codes), cricket, athletics, boxing, F1, tennis, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and rugby – every privileged practitioner from this catalogue of activities who has pocketed a pretty penny over the past half a century should kneel in homage to the man who, more than any other, made their wealth and livelihood possible.
On September 10, 2009, Arnold Palmer entered the ninth decade of his life and received the Congressional Gold Medal as “an exemplary American who always gave back to others”. On April 6, 1958, he entered golf’s pantheon by completing his maiden major triumph at the Masters under the approving gaze of the tournament’s founder, the great Bobby Jones. The intervening years witnessed the wholesale transformation of sports stars from forelock-tugging acolytes at best, social degenerates more often than not, into trend-setting role models, the equal (if not superior) of film stars and politicians. It is impossible to assert as absolute fact that this process only unfolded because of Palmer – after all, had he not existed his business mentor and minder, Mark McCormack, would surely have found another hero to market from sporting phenomenon into household brand. But whether any old hero could have slotted into the template McCormack fashioned for him as completely and definitively as Palmer has for so long is a moot point. After adding the first of his four green jackets to the US Amateur Championship he won four years earlier at the Country Club of Detroit, Palmer suddenly found himself installed as the heir apparent to what had hitherto been regarded as the golden generation of American golf – spearheaded by Snead, Hogan and Nelson. Each of these men was a star performer with a devoted public following, but none could claim with any conviction, even at the height of his fame and prowess, that he was made for life. Indeed, Byron Nelson had walked away from the tour having hoovered up 32 titles between 1944 and 1946 because he reckoned running a farm was a safer and more lucrative way of earning a living.
At the time there was some merit to that view. In the decade or so after World War II, golf struggled to shake off its image as something akin to a travelling circus. Titles fell in the main to the usual suspects and the feeling gradually developed that the game was stagnating. Palmer's first win as a pro was in the 1955 Canadian Open and he claimed a further seven tour titles before that historic breakthrough victory at Augusta National. Like a meteor, he struck golf's firmament just as Jones had done almost two generations earlier. There was an edge of Pittsburgh steel to Palmer as well, a legacy of the humble, dignified upbringing he enjoyed in Pennsylvania as the son of a club professional/greenkeeper. He recalls: “My dad used to say to me: ‘Be tough boy. Go out and play your own game. If you start listening to other people when you’re out there then you’re not too smart and I have a job pushing a lawn mower back here and you can come right back and do that.’ He was right, 100% right. That was his psychology and it’s been mine ever since, too.” He certainly drew on this advice when, leading the 1958 Masters by one shot in the last round, he challenged a ruling he received over a plugged ball at the back of the 12th green. Told by an official that he had to play it where it lay, Palmer decided to do just that and also to play a second ball having taken relief from the lie. He then had to play the next few holes knowing the Masters committee might decide to disqualify him for defying the ruling. On the 15th, though, a deputation from Jones informed him that his three would be allowed to stand. The difference between the five he scored with the first ball and his three with the second proved the difference between claiming a one-shot victory and finishing third.
Shortly afterwards, the handshake that cemented his commercial relationship with McCormack took place and his business affairs have ever since been overseen by the late lawyer's company, International Management Group. Palmer had heard that Clifford Roberts, who eventually succeeded Jones as chairman of the Masters, had served as President Eisenhower's “ultimate inner-circle man, adviser and protector, friend and counselor”, and he sought the same commitment from McCormack. “I'll be your Clifford Roberts,” Palmer recalled McCormack saying as they shook hands. As with Eisenhower and Roberts, no paperwork was required. The fruits of that bond included buying outright his home club at Latrobe where he grew up and later his winter retreat in Orlando, Florida – Bay Hill Club & Lodge – which hosts the Arnold Palmer Invitational on the PGA Tour. He also found himself branded with his two greatest on-course rivals – Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus – as The Big Three for a series of made-for-TV matches masterminded by McCormack.
But what swung the deal for ever in his favour was the fact that he always took time to talk to anyone who spoke to him or asked for an autograph. He kept both feet on the ground while standing on tiptoe to bank the money. Not only was he golf's unofficial ambassador, but also its self-styled king. “I’m eternally grateful for what golf has given me in my life,” he says. “Without it I’d be nothing, a decent guy, hopefully, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. Instead I've met some of the greatest people possible and had just so many good times. I look around now and see all the changes and I shake my head at the improvements to every facet of this grand game.” Today, with his blue-chip roll call of sponsors, his unstinting support for medical charities, his love of flying his own plane, his friendships with every US president since Eisenhower, his founding of the Golf Channel, his hosting of PGA Tour events and his current passion for designing playable courses, he is universally acknowledged as the game's Renaissance Man. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods may have won more tournaments, amassed more major championships, but there will never be a more important golfer than Arnold Palmer. After all, how else can you describe a man known to millions of his fellow Americans for reasons way beyond golf? Next time you visit a bar over there, ask for an ‘Arnold Palmer’. The bar tender may know nothing about tee boxes or the King’s golfing exploits, but he’ll know to serve you a glass of lemonade-flavoured iced tea. Fame doesn’t come any cooler than that!
Palmer and the Open When the world’s leading players assembled at St Andrews for the 150th anniversary of the Open in July, they contested a £6-million purse and pursuing a £1-million winner’s cheque. In terms of prize money, global status, media profile and course set-up, the 139th version of the Open will be light years ahead of its 89th staging over the Old Course. The only good thing the Open in 1960 had going for it was that it was also the centenary edition of golf’s oldest championship. As it proved, this was the allure that teased an entry out of a 30-year-old American who was rewriting golf's history books at a whirlwind rate. And it was not long before the Open started to benefit from his blast of stardust. Palmer had won the Masters for a second time that April and followed up two months later with a thrilling, come-from behind triumph in the US Open at Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Colorado. At the time, the only ‘grand slam’ concept to have entered the sport’s thinking was the annexing in one year of the Open and Amateur Championships of both the British Isles and the United States – a feat achieved just once, in 1930, by Bobby Jones and immediately dubbed by writer O.B. Keeler as ‘an impregnable quadrilateral’. Championships took a back seat. The old slam had thus faded into sepia-tinted obscurity and nothing had been devised to replace it in the public consciousness by the time Palmer decided to make his Open debut.
“My desire to play in the Open in Britain went back to my days as a schoolboy golfer when I read newspaper accounts of top American players like Jones and Walter Hagen winning there,” said Palmer. “I didn’t think you could become a world renowned player unless you participated internationally. With the Open being the foremost and most prestigious championship in the world, I felt it was one I had to play.” At some stage on their journey – Palmer says it was “during our extended cocktail hour” – he and Drum started talking about Jones’s slam and how it could never be repeated. It was then Palmer revealed his hand: “What would be wrong with a professional grand slam involving the Masters, both Opens and the PGA Championship?” he asked. Initially Drum was quizzical, but gradually the idea struck a chord with the veteran reporter. Having won the first two of these major titles in 1960 was no doubt a motivating factor in Palmer’s reasoning. They stopped off in Ireland so he could team up with Sam Snead at Portmarnock to win the Canada Cup [now known as the WGC/World Cup of Golf], and Drum started to spread the idea amongst the British journalists in the press tent. When Palmer arrived in St Andrews to tackle the third leg of his self-defined quadrilateral, he was nearly washed away in a tidal wave of public support. “Everybody picked up on it [the grand slam idea] right away at St Andrews that year,” he said. In truth, the fans were equally taken with Palmer’s swashbuckling style and magnetic personality. On this occasion, though, his trademark final-round charge was not quite enough to dislodge the 54- hole leader, Kel Nagle, and Palmer came up one stroke shy of the Australian. But his love affair with the Open had permanence and he duly lifted the claret jug at Birkdale the following year and successfully defended it at Troon in 1962. The British crowds loved him: his style, the way he hitched his pants, the way his powerful swing ended in a signature flourish and, most of all, the way he played. Palmer always went for the pin and fans could identify with that. Suddenly, Arnie’s Army had troops in a foreign field. He also found himself a Scottish sergeant at arms in the shape of gnarled St Andrews caddie Tip Anderson, who played Sancha Panza to his Don Quixote for most of his Open tilts.
“He was invaluable on the Old Course. If I’d putted a little better, I would have won that first Open, but Tip was certainly the key to my playing well there,” Palmer recalls. “The only times I chose not to take his advice was when he wanted me to lay up and that wasn’t an inclination in my repertoire. “He was also very good at Birkdale and Troon. He knew those courses very well. That was extremely important to me.” Strangely, Palmer was never again a serious contender at the Open, his best subsequent finishes being an eighth and tie for seventh at Muirfield (in 1966 and 1972) and seventh on his own at Turnberry in 1977. Appropriately, he bade an emotional farewell to playing from the Swilcan Bridge in 1995 and has not returned since. But he refuses to rule out the possibility of a sentimental visit at some stage. The most fitting time, surely, would be next year at St Andrews where his odyssey began back in 1960. After all, not only did he twice embrace the claret jug, he also gave the Open as a whole the kiss of life. And does he still believe, nearly half a century later, that the Masters, US Open, Open and PGA remain the game's four true majors, a grand slam to stand the test of time? “They stand above all the rest.” To this very day, so does he. Arnold Palmer Factfile Full name: Arnold Daniel Palmer Reproduced with kind permission of Golf International Magazine
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The incident encapsulates Palmer's appeal as
a hero to a blue-collar world way beyond the
stuffy confines of golf officialdom. Here was an
Ordinary Joe, standing up for his rights and ultimately being vindicated.
Meeker characters
would have buckled in
the face of the original
ruling and their chance
of major glory would
have gone, perhaps
never to return.
Palmer's bold seizure of
that moment was the
biggest single recruitment
trigger for a golfing movement
that marched vociferously
across the world's
fairways for more than
four decades – Arnie's
Army.
With television starting to bring sporting
drama and spectacle into living rooms,
Palmer's rugged masculinity – forearms
bulging, cigarette smouldering (he eventually
gave up in 1973) – captured the nation's imagination
as he bludgeoned courses into submission
with a pioneer's never-say-die spirit. Soon
the sponsorship deals were raining down on
him from every walk of life, not just golf companies,
and he swiftly became the advertising
industry’s top ‘pitch man’.
In truth, it was not until he boarded his transatlantic flight
that summer, in the company of golf journalist Bob Drum
from the Pittsburgh Press, that the concept of a modern version
of the grand slam began to crystallize.
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