Arnold Palmer still stands alone as golf legend
“The only really unplayable lie is when you’re supposed to be playing golf and come home with lipstick on your collar.”
– Arnold Palmer
Whatever age he was when he delivered that line, it wasn’t exactly an admission, it was more like a knowing wink, shared among people he knew wouldn’t take it the wrong way — or the right way, which might be more harmful.
Either way, they would protect him, because that was what it was like to be Arnold Palmer before cellphone cameras and social media turned being a celebrity into a constant worry about Big Brother looking over your shoulder.
He was always among friends, because he was friendly himself, and courteous, and generous with his time, and there was an unspoken but well understood quid pro quo between him and the people who wrote about him.
To this day, there is a reverent tone to stories about Arnold Palmer that is nearly unique in all of sport.
Everyone accumulates some grime in the course of an athletic career, or in retirement, but Arnold Palmer has remained — as The Golf Channel, which he cofounded, tirelessly reminds us — The King.
Generations of reporters who never saw him play except in grainy old blackand-white TV highlights — he won his last major championship 50 years ago — get goosebumps when he addresses them, as though this godlike figure has just switched on the sun.
He turned 85 Wednesday, and his lipstick-on-the-collar line has been replaced by a newer joke: “You know you’re getting old when all the names in your little black book have M.D. after them.”
He might have borrowed that line from Bob Hope. They all knew Palmer, all the stars, all the presidents. As novelist/screenwriter Raymond Chandler once said of James Bond: men wanted to be him, women wanted to be with him.
Some of the women, the story goes, succeeded.
But very little that is sordid ever stuck to Palmer.
Age notwithstanding, his legend remains as unbreakable as any in golf ’s history.
He wasn’t the greatest player ever, though he was pretty damned great.
He won all of his seven majors in a six-year period, none after age 34.
But of all the iconic names in the game’s hundreds of years — from Old Tom Morris to Bobby Jones to Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, and all those Vardons and Hagens and Sneads and Nelsons in between — none had Palmer’s impact on the sport.
Full disclosure: I was a Nicklaus guy, and it was hard to be that and a Palmer guy, too. My first recollection of golf on television, colour TV no less, was as a 13-year-old seeing Nicklaus win the 1966 Masters.
Palmer was already in decline as a major force by then, though he would win more PGA Tour events until the early ’70s, including a burst in 1971, when he won four times.
But his swashbuckling style, his hitch-up-the-pants signature, and the cigarette hanging from his lip, and Arnie’s Army, the masses of people following him, and his friendly/fierce rivalry with Nicklaus, and Gary Player — The Big Three, a TV show of its own — took golf to levels of exposure and popularity it had never known.
Lee Trevino is telling no lies when he says the first thing every PGA Tour player ought to do on the way out the door in the morning is kiss Arnold Palmer’s photograph.
His charisma is the reason the winner of the FedEx Cup today gets a bonus, which doesn’t even count as official prize money, that’s 88 times what Nicklaus earned in the entire 1964 season, the year he first took the money title from Palmer.
Palmer was once asked, presumably by a very young reporter, if he watched much golf on TV growing up.
“When I was growing up, they had just found radio,” he said.
Palmer didn’t invent television, but he gave TV a reason to follow golf.
What that has evolved into isn’t always pretty.
Wealth, yes. Recognition, yes. But the golfer-as-celebrity is a double-edged sword; just ask Tiger Woods.
A half-century ago, Arnold Palmer might have fallen on that same sword.
But he was as bulletproof as any man could be, because he gave back more than he took, and the people who knew him loved him, unconditionally. Still do. He is 85 now, and rambles a bit, and the movie-star features have been battered by age and sun.
The hair is white and thinning. Who knows how many more of these milestone occasions he’ll have?
So a belated Happy Birthday, Arnie.
And congratulations on surviving Big Brother.
The tabloids might have eaten you up, but you’d have made a helluva good-looking cover page.