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Overview
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Arnold Palmer amassed an astounding record of ninety-two worldwide titles, four Masters championships, a US Open crown, and back-to-back British Open victories, truly earning his nickname “the King”—as well as a legion of loyal fans who came to be known as “Arnie’s Army.” He exuded a charisma that America loved—and even had a drink named after him.
In this chronicle of one of the greatest players ever to swing a club, renowned sportswriter John Feinstein provides a vivid biographical portrait of golf’s most beloved icon. Accompanied by Walter Iooss’s superb photographs, The Classic Palmer lets golf lovers travel with Palmer on his journey from amateur to pro, from pro to master, and from master to legend.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613123355 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Walter Iooss has worked extensively for Sports Illustrated, photographing more than three hundred of its covers.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
There are many different ways to describe the manner in which an athlete dominates his sport. There are statistics and records and videotapes that can document one's accomplishments. There are paeans written and film tributes produced and awards presented. There are Halls of Fame to be inducted into and lifetime achievement plaques to be received.
Many athletes deserve — and receive — all these honors.
But the list of athletes for whom the rules of an entire sport have been changed is a short one.
When Babe Ruth hit more home runs in an entire season than the rest of the American League, baseball decided it needed a livelier ball to give other hitters a chance to compete with the Babe. When Lew Alcindor played college basketball at UCLA in the 1960s, the dunk was outlawed to give defenders some chance to stop the unstoppable center.
And then there is Arnold Daniel Palmer. In 1980, both the United States Golf Association and the PGA Tour believed there was a market for a golf tour for players who were no longer at their peak physically but could still play the game well and appealed to fans. There was just one problem: the player who defined that sort of appeal and charisma had just turned fifty, and USGA rules defined a senior player as someone who was fifty-five or older.
If fans were going to buy tickets for senior golf or watch it on television, if corporations were going to put up sponsorship money, Arnold Palmer had to be out there playing. It was very simple: without Palmer there would be no Senior PGA Tour. If there was any doubt about that, it vanished after the first U.S. Senior Open was played on the East Course at the famed Winged Foot Golf Club in 1980.
"We had crowds into the dozens — maybe," said David Fay, who was executive director of the USGA for twenty-one years but was at that time assistant executive director. "We had good players in the field, and it was a wonderful golf course. But we didn't have Palmer."
Waiting until Palmer turned fifty-five was not an option if there was going to be a Senior Tour. Thus, the USGA declared, in its wisdom, that professionals (not amateurs) were deemed seniors the day they turned fifty.
"A year later we had the Senior Open at Oakland Hills, and Arnie beat Billy Casper and Bob Stone in a Monday play-off," Fay said. "We had great crowds all week, including Monday. It's probably not unfair to say that if the rules change hadn't been made, there might not be a Senior Open today."
Or a Champions Tour — as the PGA Tour has called its Senior Tour since 2002 — which Palmer played on until 2007, drawing huge crowds until the day he finally decided, at the age of seventy-eight, that his game was no longer good enough to be put on public display. What he failed to understand was that the fans didn't care at that stage how many birdies he made — or didn't make. They just wanted to see the King, the leader of Arnie's Army, walk down the fairway.
Through the years there have been numerous arguments on the subject of who the greatest golfer of all time might be. It dates to the question of Bobby Jones versus Walter Hagen, or Ben Hogan versus Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, right to today's Jack Nicklaus–versus–Tiger Woods discussion.
But for the last fifty years there has been absolutely no debate about who is the most important golfer of all time. It is Arnold Palmer. They changed the rules of the sport for him. Case closed.
CHAPTER 2
Palmer was born into the game of golf. His father, Milford Jerome "Deacon" Palmer, was both the greenskeeper and the head professional at Latrobe Country Club in the hills of western Pennsylvania. The city of Latrobe is forty miles east of Pittsburgh and was founded in the mid-nineteenth century largely as a railroad town. Its population topped out at about ten thousand, although by the time the census was done in 2000 the official number was 7,634. It is listed in many historical guides as the birthplace of Rolling Rock beer and Arnold Palmer.
Most people would agree that the golfer has played a more significant role in the culture of the country and the world than the beer. Arnold was the oldest of Deacon and Doris Palmer's four children — two boys and two girls. He also spent the most time on his father's golf course. For a large chunk of his childhood, Palmer's family lived in a rented two-story house, for which they first paid fifteen dollars a month, near the 6th tee at Latrobe. Arnold was a teenager before he helped his dad build an indoor bathroom for the house.
Arnold was a golf star almost from birth. He played with other club employees whenever he could and spent just about all his free time working on his swing. He never had a picture-perfect swing by any means. In fact, most golf purists would wince at the way he followed through, contorting his body to get maximum thrust through the ball, then twirling the club at the top more in the manner of someone swishing a sword than finishing a golf swing.
The sheer effort in every swing, the violence of it, would become Palmer's calling card. It was part of the reason he was so often referred to as the game's greatest swashbuckler. His swing looked like that of a dueling pirate, and his fearless style on the golf course backed up the image created by his stroke.
Deacon Palmer was his older son's teacher, mentor, and taskmaster. Not that he ever had to get the boy to work at golf — Arnold loved the game too much to ever think of it as work. But it was Deacon who set the standard Arnold wanted so much to live up to, who made him understand that there was more to the game than blasting the ball as far as he could and making every putt possible.
Arnold has often told the story of the day he threw a club in frustration on the back nine during a match. He went on to win, but that wasn't what his father wanted to discuss on the car ride home.
"If I ever see you throw a club like that again, it will be the last time you play," Deacon Palmer said. "Understood?" Arnold understood. To get angry on the golf course was acceptable; to put your temper on display was not. Perhaps the world of golf today would be a different place if more players had taken car rides with Deacon Palmer after losing their tempers on the golf course.
Once he knew his club-tossing days were over, Arnold kept getting better and better at golf. He chose Wake Forest College (now Wake Forest University) in North Carolina and quickly became a star in college golf, winning the Southern Conference Championship as a freshman. (This was before the Atlantic Coast Conference was formed in 1953, when seven schools including Wake Forest split from the Southern Conference.) But his life and his golf career took a horrifying turn when his best friend, Buddy Worsham, and another friend, Gene Scheer, were killed in an accident en route home from a weekend dance at Duke. Worsham had asked Palmer to attend the dance with them, but Palmer had already made Friday-night plans to see a movie with another pal, Jim Flick.
After the deaths of his friends, Palmer had to get away from Wake Forest. There were too many memories. He joined the Coast Guard and continued to play golf during his three years in the service. Then he returned to Wake Forest and won the first Atlantic Coast Conference Golf Tournament in 1954. He left school again that spring, his goal being to win the U.S. Amateur Championship, the one important amateur title that had eluded him.
In those days, winning the Amateur was almost as important as winning the Masters Tournament or the U.S. Open Championship. When Bobby Jones won his "grand slam," in 1930, the four titles that made up the slam were the U.S. and British Amateurs, the U.S. Open, and the British Open, as opposed to today's grand slam, which consists of the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. There was no Masters until Jones and Clifford Roberts launched that event in 1934, and the PGA wasn't considered that important, since top amateurs like Jones weren't eligible to play.
In fact, when Ben Hogan won the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open in 1953, there was never any thought that he would try to win the PGA, because the tournament overlapped with the British Open. Very few American pros made the overseas trip in those days. When Hogan won at Carnoustie Golf Links that year, it was his first and only appearance in the British Open. It would not be until the 1960s — after Arnold Palmer began appearing on a regular basis — that most American pros began to make the trip to Great Britain each summer.
"It bothers me when people say I won seven majors," Palmer has often said. "Back when I won the Amateur it was just as important as the professional majors and harder to win, because it was grueling and because of the competition. As far as I'm concerned, I won eight majors, not seven."
In 1954, most of those who contended in the U.S. Amateur were lifelong amateurs or occasional young players who were deciding whether to pursue a pro career. Back then, turning pro wasn't a given for a talented young golfer, because there wasn't that much money to be made on tour. In fact, most pros had to work at least part of the year as club pros. Today, almost anyone who makes it through the first two rounds of stroke play at the Amateur to be one of the sixty-four who move on to match play aspires to play on the PGA Tour.
Palmer's opponent in the thirty-six-hole championship match was a very talented lifelong amateur named Robert Sweeny. A past British Amateur champion, Sweeny was forty-three and an investment banker by trade. He birdied three of the first four holes for a quick three-up lead and looked ready to turn the match into a rout.
Palmer's calling card in his prime would be his ability to come from behind. Perhaps that day at the Country Club of Detroit was the first time he put that ability on display with a lot of people watching. He rallied to take the lead late in the match and won the amateur title on the 36th hole. At the end of that year, he turned pro and began one of the great professional careers in golf history.
It can be argued that Palmer's career has actually been underrated. How is that possible? Palmer did so much for the game and heightened its popularity so greatly that people often focus on that, rather than what he accomplished on the golf course.
There is no doubting that Palmer's presence changed the PGA Tour forever. Even though the game had plenty of megastars prior to his arrival — Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, and Sam Snead among them — none had the charisma and charm that Palmer brought to the table, although if Sarazen's peak years had come during the television era, he might have been almost as beloved a figure as Palmer became.
But he wasn't. Palmer arrived on tour just as television cameras appeared in the golf world. The first tournament aired on television was in 1953, when a promoter named George S. May paid ABC thirty-two thousand dollars to broadcast his Tam O'Shanter World Championship — with a then-unheard-of first prize of twenty-five thousand dollars. NBC televised the U.S. Open nationally for the first time in 1954 — the same year Palmer won the Amateur. CBS televised the Masters for the first time in 1956. To say that Palmer's emergence as a star was a key to the growth of golf as a TV sport, and in general, is a little like saying the heat of the sun is vital to life on Earth.
That Palmer was the straw that stirred the drink — years and years before Reggie Jackson made the term popular when he came to New York to play baseball — has been agreed on for more than fifty years. If a marketing company had been hired to create the perfect golfer to lead the sport into TV nirvana, they would have created Palmer.
He had the matinee-idol looks that made women swoon and the belt-hitching swagger that made men want to be like him. Women wanted to have a quiet glass of wine with him; men wanted to have a beer with him. He had the look of a guy who grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, of a kid who came from the other side of the tracks but was completely comfortable on your side too. He was a blue-collar guy in a white-collar world.
There was no quit in him. If he fell behind, it just meant his comeback would be that much more thrilling. He wasn't smooth: he had the arms of a blacksmith and the golf swing of one too. He didn't make it look easy, and that made people want to see him win even more.
Beyond that, though, he had an almost unique ability to connect with everyone. Tiger Woods has many of Palmer's qualities — the good looks, the electrifying ability to rally, the willingness to try any shot — but he doesn't connect with people the way Palmer did. In truth, he never wanted to: Palmer looked everyone in the eye and smiled; Woods looks almost no one in the eye. Palmer seemed willing to let everyone into his life; Woods doesn't want anyone near his.
Right from the beginning, Palmer got celebrity — he understood it and embraced it.
When Curtis Strange — who always bridled at being a public figure — became the No. 1 player in the world in the 1980s, he complained to Palmer, who had been close to Strange's father, about the responsibilities that came with stardom: signing autographs, dealing with the media, spending time with sponsors. Palmer shrugged and said, "You don't have to do any of that if you don't want to."
Strange was stunned. "I don't?" he said. "How do I not do any of that?"
"Go home," Palmer answered. "Don't get paid to play golf for a living. Don't take money from sponsors. Don't get paid to wear a shirt or a hat or play with a certain kind of golf club or golf ball. Just give all that back and go home. Then you don't have to do any of that anymore."
Strange got the message.
Years later, Palmer had a similar talk with Woods, then a rookie pro, in the champions' locker room at Augusta National Golf Club.
"It's not fair," Woods complained over lunch after a pre-Masters practice round in 1997. "I can't be a normal twenty-one-year-old." He resented the obligations of fame, just as Strange had: autographs, media, photo shoots for commercials, glad-handing with sponsors.
"You know, Tiger, you're right," Palmer answered. "You aren't a normal twenty-one-year-old. Normal twenty-one-year-olds don't have fifty million dollars in the bank. If you want to be a normal twenty-one-year-old, that's fine — just give the money back."
Palmer never wanted or needed a "normal" life. He never bridled at signing an autograph or doing an interview or spending time with a sponsor. He loved interacting with fans.
"I've always tried to tell the younger guys that if they want the perks of stardom, they have to accept the responsibilities too," he said, long after he had become a superstar. "Everyone wants to make the money, to be adored and cheered, to be treated special everywhere they go. It's understandable. But you can't just go through life taking. At some point you have to give, and what we're asked to give isn't very hard to give."
When Tom Watson first ascended to the role of No. 1 player in the world, he was always cooperative with the media and generous with the fans at the golf course. He considered that part of the job. But he didn't want any intrusions into his private life. He drew a line between the public figure and the private one. Palmer thought that was understandable, but he also believed it was unnecessary.
"As a public figure, you're going to give up some of your private life," he said. "But there are moments, like when your kids all jump into bed with you to watch something on television or you're just sitting around the dinner table, that no one can take away from you — no one. That's why I've never worried about that sort of thing."
Which is why Palmer's appearance on the public stage in the mid-1950s could not have been more perfectly timed. He loved the spotlight, and the spotlight loved him. And while there were those — notably the great Ben Hogan — who wondered if Palmer had the golf swing or the game to become a star, Palmer never doubted himself. That self-confidence, along with his desire to prove Hogan and any other doubters wrong, would propel him to heights previously unimagined for a golfer. They would make him Arnold Palmer — the one for whom rules were changed and drinks were named.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Classic Palmer"
by .
Copyright © 2012 John Feinstein.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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