GOLF’S FIRST SUPERSTAR
He rose from blue-collar beginnings to sports royalty — and made millions along the way,
Arnold Palmer, a Pennsylvania greenskeeper’s son who became one of golf’s most charismatic champions and made millions of dollars by turning his popular “everyman” image into one of the most lucrative sports brands in the world, died Sunday at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, according to his longtime assistant Doc Griffin.
Palmer was hospitalized in preparation for heart surgery, but Griffin said he did not know the exact cause of death. He was 87.
Palmer rose from a blue-collar background to become part of the sport’s royalty — he was colloquially known on the PGA tour as The King — and frequent playing partner of U.S. presidents. He left an indelible mark on the world of golf in the form of nearly 300 signature-designed courses, and Arnold Palmer Enterprises helped make Palmer the first golfer to make his name a worldwide franchise.
Many credit Palmer with inventing golf as a televised sport, becoming the game’s first well-known star by helping to put a name and face to the game. Palmer’s vitality and boyishly handsome looks helped attract many new fans to the sport who watched on television. “I’ve got sex written all over my face,” Palmer once said.
Emerging as a superstar athlete in the 1950s, Palmer did not play golf courses; he attacked them. Armed with a brutish swing that more resembled a hockey slap shot than a daisy cutter, Palmer brought energy and zest to the staid game that men before him such as Bobby Jones and Sam Snead played wearing tweed coats and knickers.
Standing six-feet-two, with broad shoulders, beefy arms and massive hands, Palmer was known for bombing drives off the tee and then stalking his ball down the fairway, striding long bounds while dangling a thin cigarette between his fingers.
Frequently, though, Palmer’s heavy swing would lead him to find his ball beached in sand traps and buried in thick rough. When his options were either to play it safe by taking a stroke and punching out for a cleaner shot, or zinging it between trees and through bushes for the narrow chance to save for par, Palmer knew what to do.
“There always were conservative players, fairways-and-greens types,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “The spectators get a kick out of seeing a player take a shot, take a risk.”
Surrounded by the gallery, Palmer would flick his cigarette, hitch up his pants, and then blast his ball for often mesmerizing results.
Between1958 and1964, he won seven major titles, including the Masters four times, the U.S. Open once, and the British Open twice. Throughout a career spanning five decades, Palmer won 62 tournaments on the U.S. tour, and accrued nearly $7 million in prize money. He was the first golfer to earn $1 million in purses.
Perhaps Palmer’s most memorable tournament, and one of the greatest golf showdowns of all time, occurred at the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills Country Club near Denver.
On the final day of the event, Palmer was seven shots behind the leader — an otherwise insurmountable lead.
“What’ll happen if I shoot 65?” Palmer asked a friend before he teed off for the final round.
“Nothing,” said Pittsburgh sportswriter Bob Drum, “You blew your chance.”
“Like hell I did,” Palmer replied. “A 65 gives me 280 and 280 wins the Open.”
That day, Palmer drove the green on the 346-yard first hole. He birdied six of the seven opening holes. He shot a 65, edging out an amateur prodigy named Jack Nicklaus by two shots.
Palmer was already an established champion on the tour when Nicklaus rose from obscurity to become golf’s golden boy. In nearly every tournament they entered, Palmer and Nicklaus battled in what is known as one of golf’s fiercest rivalries.
At the1962 U.S. Open, Nicklaus won his first major championship by beating Palmer in a playoff. In 1964, Palmer finished first at the Masters, while Nicklaus was second. The next year, the order was reversed.
Their rivalry extended off the course to the business world. Palmer was known to call Nicklaus’s marketing symbol — a golden bear — a “golden pig,” reflecting Nicklaus’s pudgy physique.
In their later years, however, Palmer and Nicklaus became great friends. In 2010, Palmer and Nicklaus were ceremonial starters of the Masters.
“In terms of fan recognition, he lifted the game to another level,” Nicklaus told USA Today in 2004. “He grabbed the imagination of the public. From 1958 to 1964 it would be hard to find a golfer who played better.”
Of Palmer’s mass appeal, golf writer Dan Jenkins once noted, “Arnold Palmer did not play golf, we thought. He nailed up beams, reupholstered sofas, repaired air conditioning units. He was the most immeasurable of all golf champions.”
His fans made themselves known one year at the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, parading behind him and holding up signs that read “Arnie’s Army.” Many of them were soldiers from nearby Fort Gordon who had come to the tournament just to watch Palmer.
In all of his tournament appearances, Palmer was followed by throngs of fans who would stack themselves 15 rows deep. They’d climb trees, stand on shoulders, and even employ cardboard periscopes, anything to catch a glimpse of The King.
Palmer is also credited with creating a blended drink, an iced tea splashed with lemonade. “A guy came up to the bar and he ordered an Arnold Palmer, and the barman knew what that drink was,” said Irishman Padraig Harrington. “That’s in a league of your own.”
Always the businessman, in 2002 Palmer had his company license “Arnold Palmer Tee,” a bottled version of the drink, to the AriZona Beverage Co.
Arnold Daniel Palmer was born Sept.10,1929, in Youngstown, Pa., and raised in nearby Latrobe. He learned golf from his father, Milfred Jerome (Deke) Palmer, a strict taskmaster who worked on the grounds of the Latrobe Country Club.
Palmer recalled in his book, A Golfer’s Life, that he was 3 years old when his father placed a cut-down women’s golf club in his hands and instructed him simply to “hit it hard, boy.”
The rest Palmer did himself.