King-size salute
Players ‘hit it hard, boy’ for Arnold Palmer
ORLANDO, Fla. — They stood like silent sentinels for a moment, each holding their own memories of him in their hearts. Then the sharp crack of one drive after another being launched into the air echoed across the practice range at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club yesterday, a golfing 21-gun salute to a King.
A line of PGA Tour pros stretched from one end of the range to the other, each driving a ball as hard as a man could. Not another sound was heard as first one line of his golfing offspring and then another ripped those balls, one by one, into the air the way Arnie once said his Pap, Milfred “Deacon” Palmer, told him to when he was 8.
“Hit it hard, boy,” Palmer’s daddy advised. “Go find it and hit it hard again.”
That is how Arnold Palmer always played golf and sometimes it cost him, but it also made him the savior of the game and nothing less than the patron saint to those who play it today. And that’s how the pros honoring his memory at the annual Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill played it yesterday, six months after his passing at age 87. They hit it hard, boy. Then the next guy hit it hard again.
That was the golf shot Palmer loved best. Not just driving the ball but ripping any shot he felt needed it. As the great Gene Littler, a Hall of Fame contemporary of Palmer’s, once put it, “When he hits the ball, the earth shakes.”
All the golf world did whenever he passed by, right to the end. Then it stopped for a moment when the inevitable came last Sept. 25 and Arnold Palmer passed away. Now the tournament that bore his name for the past 38 years is going on without him but yesterday, as the crack of those drivers sent one ball after another flying into the air before a Coast Guard helicopter commemorating his military service lifted off and flew away as if taking Palmer with it. It was as if he was still hovering over the place.
His clubs stood right behind the practice range in his signature bag, resting under a rainbow-colored umbrella that had become his logo. While the No. 1 player in the world, Dustin Johnson, chose to skip the event, the tournament has attracted a strong field, including the Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5 players: Jason Day, Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama and Henrik Stenson.
Each is here to win, of course, all with an eye of preparing themselves for next month’s Masters. But they had come for more than that. They had come to pay homage to the man who is the reason golf became adopted by the masses, a transformation that has helped make them all rich.
Palmer, too, became a multi-millionaire more from his post-career business ventures than his actual golf earnings, but everything he had came from the sport he began playing when his father first showed him how to grip a club at age 3. He never changed it because, he once said, “He told me what to do and I did it and I did it as fast as I could get it done. That included playing golf.”
He did it, and most everything else he tried, so well that among McIlroy’s most cherished possessions are the letters Palmer wrote to him and many other pros after they won a tournament. The last one he received came after McIlroy had won the Deutsche Bank at TPC Boston last Labor Day weekend, less than three weeks before Palmer died.
“Any time you win a golf tournament or do anything of note, the one really classy thing that both Arnie and Jack Nicklaus do is write you a letter,” McIlroy said yesterday. “So the first letter I ever received from Arnold was after I won Quail Hollow in 2010, my first event on the PGA Tour.
“Then basically after every win since I’ve gotten a letter from him. I think he sent me a letter after I won Deutsche Bank last year, which was a week or 10 days before he passed, so it might have been one of the last letters he ever wrote. That means a lot to me.
“I remember getting that letter after I won the U.S. Open from Arnold and when he said you’re now in a position where you have a responsibility, it hits home with you. I framed every one of them. They’re all in my office at home. They mean a lot to me.”
Surely they do but not as much as Arnold Palmer meant to golf. He was Tiger before Tiger and was still Tiger after Tiger. He had what only a few of the greatest of great athletes possess. Arnold Palmer had staying power and it wasn’t because he won the most tournaments, because he did not. It wasn’t because he won the most majors either, because he did not.
What Arnold Palmer won was why thousands stood silently yesterday as those balls flew off, one by one. Arnold won the people.
He was the working class hero of a sport that is anything but working class, his massive hands and forearms and his everyman approach to not only sport but to celebrity always making the average guy feel as if they had their own warrior out there on those countryclub courses so few of them would ever set foot on.
“Jack won majors for 25 years; I won them for 20; Arnold won them for six,” Hall of Famer Gary Player told longtime golf writer Larry Dorman once. “But because he was so charismatic, because he did so much for golf, because the people loved him so dearly, they thought he was still winning. And, you know what? He was.”
Yesterday, Arnold Palmer won one last time as those balls cut through the air, one after another. Every ball was hit the way his Pap told him to do it.
They hit ’em hard for Arnie, boy. Then the next guy hit it hard again.